Vivienne is a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She holds an MA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Leipzig. With her current research on early 20th-century Arab women’s periodicals, she further delves into her research interests, which include Arab print culture, women’s literatures, as well as Nahda and post-Nahda social history and social theory. 

Research Project 

The project Writing Arab Women into History: Belonging & Community in and around Early Syrian Women’s Periodicals seeks to understand notions of community and belonging in Syrian women’s periodicals between 1909 and 1939. 

It asks how women (editors and writers, but also readers) made sense of the changing social and political circumstances, such as the great famine in Mount Lebanon, colonial rule, and growing nationalist movements, but also how they reflected their own political agency between local organizing and the participation in a global women’s movement. During these turbulent years, what did community and belonging mean to the interlocutors of the unique social spaces that were women’s periodicals? 

Combining approaches from conceptual history, social history and periodical studies, the project aims to flesh out women’s periodicals as specific social and political institutions, which were in reciprocal relationships with their surrounding communities. I hope to work out the notion of belonging in women’s periodicals, both on the conceptual, and the formal level, through the study of genres like letters to the editor, subscriber’s lists, and taqrīz. The project also asks about the community or communities women’s periodicals claimed to represent and actually represented, arguing for a multi-layered understanding of belonging.