Nawal El Saadawi, symbolic candidate for the presidency of Egypt and current Spring 2005 Visiting Scholar/Practitioner-in-residence for the Intercollegiate Women’s Studies Center at Scripps College will speak on Tuesday, March 1, at 7:30 p.m., at Balch Auditorium on the Scripps College campus. El Saadawi will lecture on, “Creativity, Dissidence and Women.” This lecture is free and open to the public on a first-come, first served basis. El Saadawi’s visit to the Claremont College community is sponsored by a Mellon Grant given to Scripps College. For more information about the lecture, please contact (909) 607-3250.
Nawal el Saadawi is an internationally known feminist, human rights activist, and writer, who has presented herself as a symbolic challenger to Mubarak’s Presidency. A trained psychologist, El Saadawi works tirelessly on behalf of women in Egypt and the Middle East. Her novels and books on the situation of women in Egyptian and Arab society have had a deep impact on successive generations of young women. She is the founder and current leader of the Arab Women Solidarity Association, which was closed by government decree in 1991.
Her writings and activism made her the target of public condemnation and even imprisonment. Former President Sadat put her in prison and she was not released until one month after his assassination. El Saadawi was forced into exile in the mid-1990s after state suppression of secular thinkers forced her abroad to work.
Award winner of several national and international literary prizes, El Saadawi has lectured all over the world. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. Now at Scripps College in Claremont, California, El Saadawi is leading a class entitled, “Internship in Feminist Activism: A Feminist Critique of 3 Holy Books.” El Saadawi lectures on the relationship between creativity and dissidence at Universities in the United States and Spain and still returns to Cairo for a portion of the year.