PATH+: Sherine Hamdy (Anthropology, UC Irvine): Landing in Place

Join us for our next PATH+ event! We are delighted to welcome Sherine Hamdy, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine, for a book talk on her new graphic novel Landing in Place (Penguin Random House, 2026), illustrated by Myra El Mir.

Hamdy is a medical anthropologist whose work has long moved between scholarship and storytelling. Her first book, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California Press, 2012), was followed by wide-ranging work on Muslim medical ethics, the political economy of disease in Egypt, and the role of physicians in the Arab Spring uprisings. With her co-authored graphic novel Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution, she inaugurated the University of Toronto Press ethnoGRAPHIC series, which she now edits, and she has become a leading advocate for academics sharing their research across multiple media forms.

Landing in Place is a coming-of-age story about Anisa, an Egyptian American college freshman following in her older sister’s footsteps on the premed track, though she would rather study art. When she fails her first semester, feeling out of place both in organic chemistry and among the Muslim students on campus, Anisa persuades her parents to let her spend time in Cairo with her beloved grandfather. There, pressing against familial, societal, and religious expectations, she begins to find her own artistic voice, and to carry it home with her.

RSVP for the Sherine Hamdy talk