Shireen Hamza

Shireen Hamza

shireenhamza@g.harvard.edu
History of Science

Shireen Hamza likes to sing and dance in the sun. She is an historian and artist living in Chicago, where she teaches with a prison education project (PNAP) and volunteers with Believers Bail Out, a bail fund for Muslims in pre-trial and ICE incarceration. Her historical research focuses on the history of medicine, bodies, and sexuality in the medieval Islamic world, especially those regions connected by the Indian Ocean. In her CMP capstone project, Scores for Humoral Medicine, Shireen draws on premodern medical texts to create poetic scores for dance and movement. Inspired by the disability dance community in Chicago, Shireen facilitates intimate workshops for dancers and non-dancers to explore themes of illness and therapeutics through the scores. This project is ongoing; Shireen is seeking collaborators to bring movement workshops into new settings.