Marya Hannun

Marya Hannun is a historian of modern Afghanistan, with a focus on women, gender and Islamic reform. Her research is animated by a commitment to writing Afghanistan firmly into feminist histories of the Middle East and destabilizing the boundaries that silo Area Studies. She holds a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where she also serves as the Managing Editor of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Her current book project, Mobilizing Women,  is on Afghanistan's first women's movement and gendered reforms in the early twentieth century in the context of wider transregional mobilities and political networks.

Marya's project for the Mapping Connections Early Career Fellowship builds aims to historicize the conceptual terrain undergirding contemporary regional entanglements. Her research will examine the changing means and meanings of mobility in Asia in late colonial and early nation-state histories through the case of Afghanistan—alternatively framed as a periphery of the Middle East and the “heart of Asia. ” The project traces how “Asia” evolved as a conceptual space in the minds and writings of Afghan and Muslim intellectuals connected to Afghanistan in the twentieth century in their efforts to forge transnational political belongings, from anti-colonial pan-Islamism to communism.