UCLA Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender Studies Sondra Hale received an honorary doctorate in the arts from Ahfad Unviersity for Women on April 27, 2016. One of the top universities in Africa, Ahfad is also a PhD-granting institute in Women’s Studies. The university funded Hale to travel to Omdurman, Sudan, for the award ceremony.
Co-founder of the oldest graduate student journal in African Studies, UFAHAMU, and a past co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Hale has also served as a co-director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. She completed her B.A., master’s degree and doctorate at UCLA, where she has devoted over 50 years of her life to research and friendships in Sudan.
“I could not have been more honored by an award, considering that Ahfad University has served women and other minoritized people inside and outside Sudan for decades and has been my second university home for nearly 50 years,” said Hale.
Her latest publications include two co-edited volumes: “Sudan’s Killing Fields: Political Violence and Fragmentation,” with Laura Beny (Red Sea Press, 2015); and “Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan,” with Gada Kadoda, which is now in press. Hale’s many other publications on Sudan and African women’s studies include “Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism and the State” (Westview, 1996) and “From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture” co-edited with Terry Wolverton (Otis College of Art & Design, 2011).
A special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (Vol. 10, No. 1) was published in her honor in 2014: “Scholar, Mentor, Activist: The Transnational Commitments of Sondra Hale.”
Among her most recent journal articles are “Contemporary Sudanese Youth Movements and the Role of Social Media,” with Gada Kadoda, in the special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies: “Rethinking Sudan Studies” (2015, Vol. 49, No. 1); “The New Middle East Insurrections and Other Subversions of the Modernist Frame,” in The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014, Vol. 10, No. 3); and “Memory-Work as Resistance: Eritrean and Sudanese Women in Conflict Zones. Dissent: The Politics and Poetics of Women’s Resistance,” in a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2012, Vol. 32, No. 2).
Recent book chapters authored by the UCLA professor emerita include “Notes on Sudanese Women’s Activism, Movements and Leadership,” in “Women’s Movements in Post-'Arab Spring’ North Africa,” edited by Fatima Sadiqi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); “Gendering the Politics of Memory: Women, Identity and Conflict in Sudan,” in “Fifty Years of Anthropology in Sudan: Past, Present and Future,” edited by Munzoul A. M. Assal and Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil (Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway, 2015); and “The Changing Nature of Political Activism in Sudan: Women and Youth ‘Activists’ as Catalysts in Civil Society,” with Gada Kadoda, in “Forging Two Nations: Insights on Sudan and South Sudan,” edited by Elke Grawert (OSSREA, Addis Ababa, 2013).
