Office: Morton 228
Phone: 910-962-3309
Email: pollardl

     Lisa Pollard completed her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, where she was trained in the history of the modern Middle East, the history of modern imperialism and colonialism, and modern Arabic literature.   Her current research considers the nineteenth-century Sudanese Islamic movement, the Mahdiya, as a response to European and Egyptian imperialism.  The work illustrates the various ways in which the Mahdiya was appropriated, championed and denounced by contemporary analysts and observers, and how its meaning was understood and distorted by realpolitik and the international media. Dr. Pollard is also doing research on changes in the Egyptian family between the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, the period during which Egypt made its transition from colonialism to independence.

      Dr. Pollard is the author of Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2005).  She is co-editor of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics and State-Building in Global Perspective (New York and London:  Routledge Press, 2003).    She is author of numerous articles, including “Reading, Writing and Revolution:  The Home, The Family and the Schoolroom in the Construction of Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Egyptian National Identity,” in Amira Sonbol, ed., A History of Her Own:  Muslim Women and the Deconstruction of Patriarchy (Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press, 2005); “Working by the Book:  Houses, Homes and Modernity in nineteenth-century Egypt,” in Relli Shecter, ed., Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion (New York and London:  Palgrave Press, 2004); “The Habits and Customs of Modernity:  State Scholarship, Foreign Travel and the Construction of New Egyptian Nationalism,” Arab Studies Journal, VII:2  Fall 1999/Spring 2000; “The Family Politics of Colonizing and Liberating Egypt (1882-1919), Social Politics, Vol. VII, Spring 2000.

      Dr. Pollard teaches a variety of courses on the history of the Middle East and Islam.  Those courses include HST 381 (History of Early Islamic Societies); HST 382 (History of the Modern Middle East); HST 383 (History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East); and HST 384 (History of Palestine and Israel).  She also teaches undergraduate and graduate seminars on Middle Eastern and Global history.  For more information on her courses, see http://www.uncw.edu/people/pollardl

      Dr. Pollard is co-coordinator of UNCW’s minor in Middle East Studies, and a member of the Women’s Studies Faculty.