Guity Nashat (Becker) is a professor Emerita of history, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has been a Research Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, since 1990. She has also taught at the Harris School, and the Loyola University in Chicago. Her teaching has focused on political and economic history of the Middle East since the rise of Islam in the seventh century.
She authored The Origins of Modern Reform in Iran, and co-authored Women in the Middle East, with Judith Tucker, Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic with Lois Beck, and The Economics of Life with Gary Becker, and edited Women and Revolution in Iran.
Her articles have appeared in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Middle East Journal, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Iran-Nameh, American Historical Journal, Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, Blackwell’s Companion to Gender History, and the International History Review. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.
Nashat has presented papers at conferences in the US, Europe, the Middle East, China and Japan, and The World Economic Forum. She was a member of the World Bank’s ten year project: “Gender and Economic Research and Policy Analysis in MENA Countries” which sponsored research and conferences on women’s education and employment in the Middle East.
Guity Nashat is native of the Middle East: she was born in Baghdad and lived in Iraq, Iran and Egypt before coming to this country. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.