Malek Abisaab is associate professor of history at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he teaches courses dealing with the social and political transformation of the Middle East and women in Islamic societies, exploring new conceptual tools and comparative frameworks for discussing gender, labor and the nation-state in the Middle East. He authored, Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010); “Shi`ite Peasants and a New Nation in Colonial Lebanon: the intifada (uprising) of Bint Jubayl, 1936,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (November, 2009); “Orientalism and Historiography of Arab Women and Work,” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World (HWWA) (Fall, 2009); “Contesting Space: Gendered Discourse and Labor among Lebanese Women,” in Ghazi Falah and Caroline Nagel eds., Geographies of Muslim Women (New York: Guilford Publications, 2005), 249-274; and “’Unruly’” Workingwomen: Contesting French Colonialism and the National State in Lebanon, 1940-1946,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 16, no. 3(2004): 55-82 and co-authoring with Rula Jurdi Abisaab, The Shi`ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah’s Islamists (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, Forthcoming).