Sahar Khamis

Sahar Khamis (@Skhamis) is an expert on Arab and Muslim media and digital activism. Her expertise ranges from media changes since the Arab Spring and how Islamophobia spreads to digital authoritarianism and women’s struggles to secure their rights in the Middle East and North Africa.

Dr. Khamis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The former head of the Mass Communication Department at Qatar University, she holds a PhD in Mass Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Manchester in England. She is a former Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and a former Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

She co-authored the books Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She co-edited the book Arab Women’s Activism and Socio-Political Transformation: Unfinished Gendered Revolutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Dr. Khamis is the author or co-author of numerous book chapters, journal articles and conference papers in English and Arabic. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious academic and professional awards and a member of the editorial boards of several journals in the field of communication, in general, and the field of Arab and Muslim media in particular. Dr. Khamis is a media commentator and analyst, a public speaker, a radio host, and a former human rights commissioner in Montgomery County, Maryland.