Susanna Ferguson

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of the modern Arab world, with particular focus on Egypt and the Levant. Her research asks how questions about gender, sex, science, and property shaped political and social life in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world.

Ferguson's first book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought  appeared 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 argues that 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. The book won the Fatima Mernissi Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for “outstanding scholarship in studies of gender, sexuality, and women’s lived experience” in 2025. It also received an Honorable Mention for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize for the best book in the history of women, gender, and sexuality in 2025. 

Ferguson’s new work focuses on how Arabic-speakers turned to plants and plant knowledge to grapple with problems of political belonging and biological diversity in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria 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. In conversation with critical histories of colonial and settler botany, it shifts focus from how colonizers used the science of botany as an instrument of domination to how Arabic-speakers understood and theorized the natural world. 

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.

2025. “Arabic Ecologies: The Politics of Plant Belonging in Nineteenth-Century Beirut.” Cultural Politics (Forthcoming).

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

 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.