Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

"As a lifelong New Yorker and Yankees fan, moving south was a great challenge. My consolation for leaving the Big Apple has been Georgetown, which has proven to be a great intellectual home." Fida Adely came to SFS and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) in the fall of 2007 as the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies, a position which was an ideal match for Adely's interdisciplinary training and research as well as her regional expertise. "The more I learned about SFS, the clearer it became that this was a unique opportunity to pursue the sometimes peculiar overlapping areas of scholarly interest I had cultivated over the past ten years," she remembers. "I have not been disappointed. My colleagues in SFS do brilliant work spanning a variety of disciplines, and the resources available here for students interested in the Arab world – in terms of language instruction, faculty and extra-curricular events – are extensive and extraordinary."

Adely's teaching interests include education, development, and gender in the Arab world as well as Arab society and culture. She teaches chiefly in the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program, and relishes interacting with students who she says "come prepared with an excellent foundation of knowledge and insight of the Arab world, allowing for serious engagement with and sophisticated analyses of the region." Adely’s current research builds on her doctoral thesis on secondary schooling for girls in Jordan. It examines the role of schools as both state institutions and critical social spaces for young women in their struggles to define and make sense of sometimes-competing national, religious and gender identities. She is also currently writing about a Jordanian grassroots campaign in support of greater freedom of expression and representation for students at Jordanian universities, a project undertaken in collaboration with a working group on higher education in the Arab world convened by the Social Science Research Council.

Adely received her Ph.D. in comparative education and anthropology from Columbia University and her M.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.