Dr. Sahar Khamis

Areas of Expertise

Communication, Media Studies

Biography

Dr. Sahar Khamis is Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in Arab and Muslim media. She earned her Ph.D. in Mass Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her academic experience includes leadership of Qatar University’s Mass Communication and Information Science Department and a Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative visiting professorship at the University of Chicago.

She co-authored Islam Dot Com and Egyptian Revolution 2.0 and co-edited Arab Women’s Activism and Socio-Political Transformation. Her scholarship addresses media, civic engagement, gender and social change, with publications in English and Arabic. She has served on journal editorial boards and contributes as a media host, commentator, analyst and public speaker. Her community service includes a former appointment to the Human Rights Commission in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Selected Publications and Work

Khamis, Sahar, and Amel Mili. "Arab Women's Activism and Socio-Political Transformation." Unfinished Gendered Revolutions, Cham: Palgrave MacMillan (2018). El-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Sahar M. Khamis. Islam dot com: Contemporary Islamic discourses in cyberspace. Springer, 2009. Khamis, Sahar. "Constraints on journalistic practices in the Arab world post–Arab Spring and post-Covid-19." In The Routledge Companion to Journalism in the Global South, pp. 179-188. Routledge, 2023. Khamis, S. (2022). Revisiting digital Islamic feminism: Multiple resistances, identities, and online communities. In R. Rozehnal (Ed.). Cyber Muslims: Mapping Islamic Digital Media in the Internet Age (pp. 100-113). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Khamis, S. (2020). A battle of two pandemics: Coronavirus and digital authoritarianism in the Arab World. In M. Sexton and E. Campbell (Eds.), Cyber War & Cyber Peace in the Middle East (pp. 145-162). Washington, DC: Middle East Institute. (Republished by I.B. Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in 2022).

Selected BIS Teaching

• IRL-723 Understanding and Engaging the Media

These are courses taught at BIS. For current academic information, explore the graduate program.