Kara A. Peruccio

I am a historian of the modern Middle East and Mediterranean, and my  teaching and research interests include women’s movements, modern Middle Eastern History, the twentieth-century Mediterranean world, imperialism, and cultural history. My book Suffrage Mediterranean Style: Authoritarianism and the Limits of International Feminist Solidarity  is forthcoming with NYU Press. I trace the complicated and often fraught relationships of the Egyptian Feminist Union, Italian Suffrage Federation, Union of Women of Spain, and the Turkish Women’s Union with their national authoritarian governments and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance from 1923 to 1935. I argue that these Mediterranean women challenged marginalization from both the regimes at home and the Alliance’s North Atlantic Protestant majority to advocate for themselves as valuable members of the global suffrage movement while simultaneously were often forced to make tough decisions to collaborate with the very regimes that hindered their activism. 

For my next project–tentatively titled Read All about It–I will research journals and newspapers associated with women’s suffrage organizations between 1914 and 1935 to explore how they reported on international and national news and conveyed ideas about what responsible and appropriate female citizenship looked like during and after the First World War. Each chapter will explore different national contexts, and in some cases, compare and contrast multiple journals in the same country, such as Great Britain (The Catholic Suffragist and The Common Cause), the United States (The Woman Citizen), Egypt (L’Egyptienne), Turkey (Türk Kadın Yolu), France (La Française), Italy (Il giornale della donna), Switzerland (Le mouvement féministe), and others. 

My research  has been published in the Journal of Women’s History (2021), the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2023), and California Italian Studies (2024). I have given talks related to interwar suffrage activism at Seattle University, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), Umeå University (Sweden), and Wake Forest University. I am an active member of the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH), Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD), Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS), and Women Historians of the Middle East (WHoME).

I received my PhD in Islamic History from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in August 2020. I received my MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2014) and a BA with Honors in History from Wake Forest University (2011), where she also minored in Italian and Women’s and Gender Studies. I held a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Uşak, Turkey from 2011-12.

I regularly teach courses like “History of the Modern Mediterranean World,” “Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,” “Transnational Feminisms,” and the history major capstone on “the Global First World War.” I also offer courses focusing on the Middle East such as “History & Fantasy Literature” and “Social Movements, Media, and Change.” In the future, I plan to teach courses on the Ottoman Empire and the First World War through Film and Literature. I am a one-day Jeopardy! Champion (May 9, 2025), and when not teaching and researching, you can find me cheering for the Portland Hearts of Pine and Liverpool FC!