Dr Summer Qassim
- Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow
- Affiliated Lecturer, Centre for Gender Studies
- Affiliated Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology
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About
Summer Qassim is an Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow in Gender Studies at POLIS and a Bye-Fellow of Peterhouse. She is a political, feminist, and digital anthropologist examining how feminist commitments to equality, once they circulate beyond the academy, come to operate as norms of intimate life.
Summer completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2024, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford, an MA from New York University, and a BA in Political Science from UCLA, where her undergraduate thesis examined Islam and human rights. Her doctoral research built on four years of prior living, fieldwork, and language study in the Levant, including Fulbright-funded ethnographic research with an all-female Sufi group in Damascus and Arabic training in Damascus and Beirut to near-native fluency in Levantine colloquial. This grounding in a self-consciously non-liberal ethnographic tradition continues to shape the comparative method at the centre of her research programme.
She is Affiliated Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies and Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology.
Research
Summer's research examines a large, globally dispersed community of women who consciously cultivate essentialised femininity as an ethical practice oriented toward heterosexual commitment, drawing on over a decade of digital ethnographic fieldwork with more than fourteen thousand participants.
Her monograph in progress, Being Good Women: Feminine Magnetism, Buddhist Detachment, and Digital Goddesshood, develops a concept she calls digital schools of personhood to theorise how these practices generate new forms of ethical labour and political subjectivity.
Her article "Otherwise Feminist: On Feminist Normativity, Intimate Life, and the Costs of Equality" (under review at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society) argues that feminist commitments to equality, forged for civic and professional life, can function as an unexamined standard for intimate life as well, and that the women she studies redistribute, rather than reject, the feminist commitments they were raised on. Extending Saba Mahmood's challenge to liberal assumptions about agency from its original site among pious Muslim women to feminist theory's own cultural home, her work asks: what does feminist theory owe the women who inherit its ideals but find them wanting in intimate life?
Publications
Selected publications
Teaching and supervision
Graduate
Summer teaches for the MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies including Theory, Controversy and Method and Multi-disciplinary Text Seminar; convenes the Digital Ethnography module for Cambridge Research Methods (CaRM); supervises MPhil dissertations in gender studies, political anthropology, and digital research.
Undergraduate
Summer lectures on POL 21 ‘Politics and Gender’; supervises for POL 12 ‘Politics of the Middle East; lectures on Foucault for SAN 4 ‘Anthropological Theory and Methods’ in the Department of Social Anthropology; supervises undergraduate dissertations.