About Halima
Halima Kazem, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar and historian whose work spans gender, sexuality, human rights, conflict, media, and Islamic societies. Her research sits in the field of feminist history, drawing across disciplines to recover how women resist erasure under war, occupation, and authoritarian rule. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and recently served as Associate Director of Stanford University's Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Afghanistan anchors much of that work.
At the Hoover Institution, she built a 450-hour
oral history archive of the US-Afghan war, drawn
from the testimony of those who lived it. Her first
scholarly book, A Feminist History of Afghanistan:
Resisting the Erasure of Women, is forthcoming
from Bloomsbury. She is directing a documentary
film on gender apartheid, supported in part by the
Malala Fund, and earlier co-produced Frontrunner,
a documentary chronicling the campaign of the first
woman to run for president of Afghanistan.
Family archives are central to Kazem's method. She reads photographs, letters, household records, and family memory as primary historical sources, what she calls archives of survival, setting them alongside oral history to recover the lives of women left out of official accounts.
Born in Kabul and raised in California, Kazem began her career in local television news in the Bay Area in the 1990s and moved on to national network news, working the NBC news desk during the contested 2000 presidential election. She was living in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and witnessed the attacks that reshaped the city and redirected her path toward Afghanistan. In April 2002, five months after the fall of the Taliban, she returned to the country of her birth, among the first women to work inside the Arg, Afghanistan's presidential palace.
Over the two decades that followed, she reported across Afghanistan, Turkey, New Zealand, and the United States, and her work appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera. She worked as a human rights researcher with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, trained more than 300 journalists in Afghanistan, including as an instructor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and helped build Pajhwok Afghan News, the country's first independent news agency.
Kazem has taught at Stanford University, San José State University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her courses span feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, documentary filmmaking, media studies and media law, journalism, and human rights and social justice movements, including a seminar on women and war drawn from the US and Afghan conflicts.
She holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was also a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow from 2022 to 2024, and a master's in Business and Economic Journalism from New York University. She serves as board chair and editor of Kaaj Magazine, an Afghan women-led investigative newsroom, and sits on the steering committee of the Alliance for the Education of Women in Afghanistan.
She is the proud mother of two daughters and finds peace in practicing yoga.
