Sahar Amer (Ph.D. in French, Yale University, 1994) is former Professor of French and Arab Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and former Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney (Australia). Her research focuses on gender and sexualities in Arab and Muslim societies, postcolonial identities, comparative, cross-cultural relations between Arab Muslims and the West and the status of Arabs and Muslims in contemporary Europe and the USA. She is especially interested in the notion of borders (cultural, linguistic, historical and geographic), not as elements of separation and division, but rather as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration.
She is the author of What Is Veiling? (UNC and Edinburgh UP, 2014), Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association of America, as well as Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l'interculturalité (Rodopi Press, 1999).  In addition, she has authored dozens of edited volumes, book chapters, and articles. She is the recipient of several national honors and awards, including a National Humanities Center Fellowship and a Fulbright.