Research interests

• Fashion and Islam, especially historical and contemporary veiling debates
• Critical approaches to Orientalism, especially travel writing, photography, and Orientalist painting
• Middle Eastern and Ottoman women's history (1800-1945)
• Postcolonial theory, gender, and race studies
• Sexuality studies, including lesbian and gay visual and literary culture, queer fashion, queer theory
• Retail geographies and non-western modernities

Photo by Neil Turner ©TSL Education

Current Research

My current research breaks down into two interconnected areas - feminist postcolonial studies (concerned predominantly with relations between Islam and the west), and lesbian, gay, and queer studies (concerned mainly with the role of dress in the formulation of sexed and gendered identities).

My current work in feminist postcolonial studies focuses on how the figure of the Muslim woman, veiled or unveiled, continues to be central to changing debates about the relations between Islam and the west. I have been researching and publishing in this area for some time: my first book, Gendering Orientalism (1996), brought to light the contribution to imperial cultures of nineteenth-century western women artists and writers in order to demonstrate the heterogeneity and contested nature of Orientalist discourse. My subsequent study, Rethinking Orientalism (2004), looking at the early twentieth century, revealed how women codified as Oriental (and stereotyped as silenced and oppressed) were in fact able to manipulate western cultural codes and challenge western assumptions about middle eastern life - at the same time as they relied on Orientalist stereotypes to create a market for their books.

My new research brings these historical examples up to date by examining the continued and contemporary commodification of Muslim femininities, including historical and current veiling debates, the development of diaspora fashion circuits, and the neo-Orientalisms developing in relation to Turkey's bid for EU accession. Putting fashion and Islam in dynamic with each other, this research focuses, for example, on how the dress acts of veiled staff working in fashion retail impact on the personal experience of other staff, the retail geographies of consumers, and the industrial policies of employers and brands. Using the hyper-visibility of the veiled body as a lens through which to view contemporary postcolonial cultural crises, this research includes attention to alternative modes of fashion innovation and mediation such as the new Muslim lifestyle media.

My historical interest in middle eastern women's history and Orientalism continues with the Cultures in Dialogue book series, and associated research publications, that bring back into circulation travel writing from and about the middle east by women since 1800.

My work in sexualities studies uses an interdisciplinary methodology to think about circuits of production, distribution, and reception and particularly how forms of cultural consumption create a sense of who we are. A concern with audience informed the compilation of my co-edited collection Outlooks (with Peter Horne) which in 1996 helped establish the field for queer visual studies. My recent contributions in this area have been primarily interested in matters of dress and identity, looking at lesbians as consumers of mainstream fashion magazines, and as producers and consumers of queer lifestyle publications. Building on this, my new project involves a reconsideration of performativity - analysing the historicised cultural competencies needed to enact and decode the dressed performance of ethnicised, sexual, and gender identities. Having written on lesbian dress and visual pleasure, and always keen for a reason to dress up, my new work in this field is being developed as part of an ongoing performance piece called 'Out of the closet and into the wardrobe'.

Monographs

2006, Editor, with Nancy Micklewright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Feminisms: A Critical Reader, IB Tauris  

2004, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem, London: IB Tauris, New York, Rutgers  

2003, Editor, with Sara Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press

Articles

2007 'Veils and Sales: Muslims and the Spaces of Postcolonial Fashion Retail' in Fashion Theory. Fashion Theory, Volume 11, Issue 4

2007 'Feminist Dialogues across Cultures: An English Woman in a Turkish Harem and the Turkish Harem in an English Woman' (with Teresa Heffernan), introduction to Grace Ellison (1915), An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem, new edition, Cultures in Dialogue, series editors Teresa Heffernan and Reina Lewis (Gorgias Press 2007)

2005 '"Oriental" Femininity as Cultural Commodity: Authorship, Authority and Authenticity' in Jos Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts (eds), Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, Blackwells.

2004 'Iconic Disenchantment: Evaluating Femininity in the East and the West', introduction to Zeyneb Hanoum (1913) A Turkish Woman's European Impressions, new edition, Cultures in Dialogue, series editors Teresa Heffernan and Reina Lewis (Gorgias Press 2004).

2003 'Preface', in David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros (eds), Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, London: inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) and MIT. (To accompany an international touring exhibition, 2003.)

2001 'Comparative Modernities: Ottoman Women Writers and Western Feminism', in Shoma Munshi (ed), Images of the 'Modern Woman' in Asia, Curzon, pp.188-211.
-reprinted as 'Writing the Racialised Self: Ottoman Women Writers and Western Feminism', in Phil Cohen (ed) New Ethnicities, Old Racisms, Zed Books, pp.63-81.

2001 'Photography and Cross Cultural Dressing in the Late Ottoman Empire', In ISIM Newsletter, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World.

'On Love, Marriage and Modernity: Feminism and Citizenship in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkey', in Anglo-Saxonica: Revista do Centro de Estudos Anglisticos da Universidade de Lisboa, vol.3, nos. 14/15, pp215-240.

'Queer Theory', Women's Studies Encyclopaedia, Routledge.

Selected papers at international universities and conferences abroad

2007

'Bodies in Motion: Dress, Identity, and the Spaces of the Modern City', plenary paper, Women and Migration, Zeytinburnu, Istanbul

'Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: the Veil, the Body, the Law', keynote paper, Cosmopolitan Islamic Identities and Thought, Association of Muslim Social Scientists, Wilfred Laurier University, Canada

2006

'Late Ottoman Women, writing, and the selling of identity', plenary speaker, Women in the Arts and Writing: Negotiating the Ottoman Public Sphere in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Atatürk Institute of Modern Turkish History, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul.

'Dress Acts: Performing Lesbian Identity 1980-2005', Lesbian Lives XVIII: Historicising the Lesbian, University College, Dublin.

'Commodifying authenticity: harem literature and the selling of self', Cultural Studies at the Crossroads, Bilgi University, Istanbul.

2005

'Out of the Closet and into the Wardrobe: Dress Acts, Queer Identities, and Taking a Good Look', keynote speaker, Pervot Puheet: Teorian Ja Aktivismin Risteymia, University of Turku, Finland.

'Selling Bodies: Veils, Shop-Girls and Consumption', plenary speaker, Femme Globale - Gender Perspectives in the 21st Century, Humboldt University, Berlin.

'Feminisms Across Borders: Dialogues From and About the Harem', panel convenor, Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Scripps College, Claremont, CA.

'Authorship, Performativity, and Commodification: Selling Models of Desire from the Ottoman Harem', School of Art History, University of Helsinki.

2004

'Rewriting the Ottoman Woman: Narratives of Modernisation and Gender at the End of Empire', roundtable, MESA, Middle East Studies Association, San Francisco.

'The Pull of the Harem: the Socialising Effects of Segregated Spatiality', plenary speaker, Harem in History and Imagination, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, MIT, Harvard University.

2003

'Modernising Ottoman Spaces: The Harem, Emancipation and Narratives of Identity', panel convenor, Modernity and Modernism in the Mediterranean World, University of Toronto.

'Taking a Turn with Cultures', plenary speaker, Feminist Transitions: Social, Cultural and Global, University of Limerick.

2002

'Selling the Harem: Intervening in Orientalist Representations of Ottoman Women', Middle Eastern Studies Association, Washington DC.

'Making a Figure of Herself: Spaces, Bodies and Identities in the Illustrated Travel Writing of Ottoman Woman', plenary speaker, Modern Art and the Mediterranean: Spaces of Modernity, Body Politics and Post-Colonial Identities, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

'Race and the Construction of Orientalised Identities', Modern Languages Association, New Orleans.

2001

'Beyond Orientalist Dichotomies: Performing Ottoman Identities', plenary speaker, Interculturalism and Gender, University of Trier.

'Appropriating the Other? The interplay of other and self in the representation of Ottoman women's lives, 1900-1930', plenary speaker, Aesthetic Encounters, Kuwait University.

Supervision expertise

I am happy to consider supervising research which in some way links to the following areas:
Fashion and Islam; Orientalism; travel writing; middle eastern and ottoman women's history (1800-1945); postcolonial theory, gender, and race studies; sexuality studies, including LGBT visual and literary culture, queer fashion, queer theory; retail geographies and non-western modernities.

Current Research Students

Serkan Delice: The Construction of Masculinities in 19th Century Ottoman Society: A Gendered Reading of Military Modernisation
Rachel Lifter: The Indie Project: Style and Youth Culture in London

Email

reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk

Co-ordinator of the Historical and Cultural Studies Hub