Biography
Vickie Langohr is a full professor in the Political Science department at the College of the Holy Cross, which she joined in 1998. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2000, and a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. She has directed the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies programs at Holy Cross.
Professor Langohr has published in Comparative Politics, the Journal of Democracy, Contemporary Studies in Society and History and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and on the websites of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Middle East Report. Her early research drew on archival work in Cairo and New Delhi and was funded by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. That work focused on the development of Muslim and Hindu religious nationalist movements under British and Dutch colonialism in Egypt, India, and Indonesia. She is currently working on a book on movements against public sexual harassment in Egypt since the Arab uprisings in 2011, based on interviews with activists, lawyers, and women who have pursued their harassers in court, as well as on analysis of prime-time talk show coverage of harassment between 2008 and 2021. She argues that while political scientists assessing the outcome of attempted democratizations or periods of political upheaval tend to focus on quantifiable changes, such as shifts in electoral politics, laws and constitutions, the successes won by Egyptian post-2011 movements against public sexual harassment represent less easily measured forms of change which may have even greater impact on the daily freedoms enjoyed by or denied to citizens.
Professor Langohr is an active member of the Middle East studies professional community. She served on the board of the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) from 2014-7. She has been a member of the Middle East Report Board of Directors since 2019 and served on MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF), focusing on rights violations in the Middle East, from 2013-2019 and has been a member of the North American wing of CAF from 2023-present.