Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow
Reem Kosba is a scholar of religion, feminist studies, and material culture whose interdisciplinary research brings together anthropology, religious studies, sociology, art history, media and fashion studies, to examine the intersections of Islam, aesthetics, gender, and materiality in Egypt. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from Ain Shams University in Cairo and her M.A. in Islamic Studies and Ph.D. in the Anthropology of Religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, completing her doctorate in May 2025. Following graduation, she taught in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology, and Anthropology at the American University in Cairo.
Her research explores lived religion, dress and fashion, visual and material culture, colonialism, heritage, nationalism, and feminist and decolonial thought. Her doctoral dissertation, Religion and Fashion in Contemporary Egypt: The Aesthetics and Politics of Dress, examines how fashion serves as a site for negotiating religion, identity, gender, and cultural heritage in modern Egypt. Drawing on Egyptology as a complementary discipline to anthropology, she also investigates the contemporary reinterpretation of ancient Egyptian visual culture and its role in heritage preservation, national identity, and decolonial aesthetics.
As the 2026 Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Reem will work on the unveiling movement in post-2011 Egypt, examining how political change, religious doubt, spirituality, and social media, have reshaped women’s understandings of veiling, modesty, femininity, sexuality, and religious practice in contemporary Egypt. This research sheds light on the complex and evolving landscape of gender, religion, and social change in post-revolutionary Egypt. It contributes to the existing body of literature on the hijab and the fourth feminist movement in Egypt by examining the changing perceptions of piety and modesty, and how it challenges traditional perceptions of religiosity.
She is currently preparing her doctoral manuscript for publication, and her scholarship includes forthcoming peer-reviewed chapters with the American University in Cairo Press and Cambridge University Press.
