explorer. researcher.educator
Bio
Mona Atia is an Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University. She is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity and finance, philanthropy and humanitarianism, housing/urban development, the production of poverty knowledge and the spatial politics of marginalization. She is on the editorial board of the Middle East Report and Information Project (MERIP) and a board member of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
She is currently writing up the results of her research based on a National Science Foundation CAREER award entitled “The Impact of Poverty Mapping on the Geography of Development.” The project which is now called Spatializing Poverty, examines the production, use and impact of poverty mapping in Morocco and France.
She is the author of Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her most recent research has appeared in the journals Antipode, Cities, Political Geography, Geography Compass, and Voluntas.