Susanna Ferguson

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world.

Ferguson's first book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought will appear with Stanford University Press in September 2024. The book traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought, revealing how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike. Through the work of writers working in Arabic, it shows how questions of social reproduction and women's work haunt key concepts in modern social thought, such as civilization, society, freedom, progress, labor, and democracy. The book shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Her new project examines how Arabic-speakers turned to plants and plant knowledge to grapple with problems of political belonging and biological diversity in and around Beirut and Jerusalem across the long nineteenth century. Drawing on archival documents in Arabic, Ottoman, English, and French, as well as Arabic-language works in natural science, natural history, and natural theology, it asks how Arabic speakers, both urban and rural, thought about the living world around them. 

Ferguson has published on gender, science, and education in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Studies Journal. She is a longtime host, former editor-in-chief and now associate producer at the Ottoman History Podcast, where she also co-curates the series on “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World.”

Ferguson offers a variety of courses at Smith, including on the history of the modern Middle East; the history of women, gender and sex in the Middle East; theories of revolution and social change in Arabic; histories of Arab feminism; histories of science in the Middle East; and migration and diaspora in the Middle East. In 2024, she was the recipient of the annual Student Government Association Faculty Teaching Award.

Labors of Love: Childrearing, Capitalism, and Democracy inModern Arab Thought (Stanford University Press, forthcoming Sept 2024).

2023. “Astronomy for Girls: Pedagogy and the Gendering of Science in Late-Ottoman Beirut.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 19:3 (2023): 291-316.

2022. “Sex, Sovereignty, and the Biological in the Interwar Arab East.” Modern Intellectual History 20:1 (2023): 220-246.

2021. “On Endless Empires: Sexuality and Colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Co-authored with Seçil Yılmaz. In Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, eds. Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Shields (New York: Routledge).

2018. “‘A Fever for an Education:’ Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914,” Arab Studies Journal 16:1 (2019): 58-83.