Amina Elbendary is an Assistant Professor of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo, where she teaches courses on early and medieval Islamic history, Muslim political thought and social and cultural history of the Arab Muslim world.

Elbendary is currently turning her doctoral dissertation “Faces in the Crowd: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria, 1400-1600,” into a book. The book explores reports of urban protest and dissent in the cities of Egypt and Syria under the late Mamluk and early Ottoman regimes, and analyzes both the historiography of protest and the intricacies of urban politics in the late medieval period. Her next project is a study of popular historiography in the late medieval period, including a study of the diary cum chronicle of the Damascene ‘alim Ahmad ibn Tawq.

Elbendary earned her PhD from Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007). Before studying at Cambridge she studied at AUC, earning an MA in Arabic Studies (Middle East History) for her thesis “Histories of the Muslim Hero: Medieval and Modern Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars” (1999) and a BA in political science (suma cum laude, 1996).

She is co-organizer of the Annual History Seminar at the Department of ARIC, which is a yearly seminar that brings together young scholars of Egypt and the Arab world around a chosen theme. She is also, since 2003, board member of the Women and Memory Forum, an independent research center that focuses on the study of women and gender in Arab cultural history. 

Research Interests:
Social and cultural history of the Arab Middle East, Arab-Islamic historiography, Islamic political thought, medieval and early modern popular culture, and gender history.

Publications:
al-Bindāri, Amīna,  “Muqaddima li kitāb Qāsim Amīn Tahrīr al-mar’ah wa kitāb Tal’at Ḥarb Tarbiyat al-mar’ah wa al-ḥijāb,” in Qāsim Amīn Tahrīr al-mar’ah wa Tal’at Ḥarb Tarbiyat al-mar’ah wa al-ḥijāb,  (Alexandria: Library of Alexandria, forthcoming).

Elbendary, Amina, “The historiography of protest in late Mamluk and early Ottoman Egypt and Syria,” International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter, 43 (Spring 2007).

al-Sa‘di, Huda and al-Bindāri, Amīna. Al-Awqāf fi sutūr wa suwar (Cairo: Women and Memory Forum, 2006).

Elbendary, Amina. “The Worst of Times: Crisis Management and al-shidda al-`uzma,” in Money, Land and Trade: An Economic History of the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. Nelly Hanna (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002).

Elbendary, Amina A. “The Sultan, The Tyrant and the Hero: Changing Medieval Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars,” Mamluk Studies Review 5 (2001).

Courses Taught:
ARIC/HIST 246: Survey of Arab History
ARIC/HIST 343: Birth of the Muslim community and the Rise of the Arab Caliphates, 600-945
ARIC 321: Social and Cultural History of the Middle East, 600-1800
ARIC/POLS 353: Islamic Political Thought