Marie Grace Brown

Marie Grace Brown (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is a cultural historian of the Modern Middle East with a special interest in questions of intimacy, gender, empire, and the body as historical text.

Her award-winning book, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017), traces gestures, intimacies, and adornment to give a history of northern Sudanese women’s lives under imperial rule. It argues that Sudanese women used their bodies to mark and make meaning of their positions in shifting socio-political systems of tradition, nation, modernity, and global connection. The result is a highly participatory tale of empire, characterized by economic and cultural exchange, mobility and civic opportunity, and evolving measures of beauty and womanhood.

Brown’s second book-length project, “A World of Color: Adventures in Romance in Imperial Sudan,” continues the exploration of the relationship between bodies and imperial power. The project introduces romance—the desire for, and negotiations over, companionship, connection, and adventure—as an analytic lens, and argues for an alternate imperial geography in which sentimental attachments defined the contours of empire.

Brown’s work has been supported by grants from the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Kansas, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars [formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation].