Valentine Moghadam

Valentine M. Moghadam was the External Research Coordinator for the UNRISD project on Social Policy in Late Industrializers: Social Policy and Economic Development in the Middle East and North Africa, in collaboration with Massoud Karshenas.
She is Director of Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University. Born in Tehran, Iran, Valentine Moghadam received higher education in Canada and the U.S. After obtaining a Ph.D. in sociology from the American University in Washington, D.C. in 1986, she taught the sociology of development and women in development at New York University. From 1990 through 1995 she was Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Research Program on Women and Development at the WIDER Institute of the United Nations University (UNU/WIDER), and was based in Helsinki, Finland. She was a member of the UNU delegation to two UN conferences: the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, March 1995), and the Fourth World Conference on Women (in Beijing in September 1995).

Her current areas of research are globalization, transnational feminist networks, and civil society and citizenship in the Middle East. She lectures and publishes widely and consults with several international organizations. She is a contributor to a 2001 report, coordinated by CAWTAR and the UNDP, on the impact of globalization on women’s economic conditions in the Arab world. She is joint co-ordinator of the UNRISD project on Social Policy in Late Industrializers: Social Policy and Economic Development in the Middle East and North Africa. She also takes part in the UNRISD project on Gender and Social Policy.

Valentine Moghadam has published two books, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993 - updated second edition June 2003), and Women, Work and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (1998). She has just completed her third book, Globalizing Women: Globalization, Transnational Feminist Networks, and Public Policy, which is under review. In addition, she has edited six books, including Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (1994), Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transition Economies (1993), and Patriarchy and Development: Women’s Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996).