Maro Youssef

Interests

Political Sociology; Ethnography; Gender; Democracy; North Africa and the Middle East

Biography

Maro Youssef is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focuses on gender politics, social movements, and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa. She earned her B.A. in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her M.A. in Middle East Studies from the George Washington University. She was a Thomas R. Pickering fellow with the U.S. Department of State from 2006 to 2014 and served in Washington D.C. and at U.S. Embassy Tunis and U.S. Embassy Ankara. 

Maro’s dissertation examines Islamist and secular feminist women’s associations that emerged after the 2010-2011 Revolution in Tunisia, and their relationships with the government and foreign donors during the democratic transition. She argues that women activists successfully lobbied the state for progressive gender policies that ensured the protection of women’s existing rights and granted them new rights. She draws on ethnographic methods, with a special focus on interviews and has conducted fieldwork in Tunisia and Washington D.C.