In this hour, Sarah Reith takes us on a whirlwind tour of 20th century Iraqi history, especially the ways it affected women's lives. Our tour guides are two of the finest scholars there are, Dr. Noga Efrati and Dr. Nadje al-Ali.

We'll start with one empire and end with another, as Dr. Efrati takes us from the Ottoman Empire to the final days of the British Mandate. For the second half of the 20th century, there is no better person to ask than Dr. Nadje al-Ali, author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present.

Dr. Efrati is an accomplished historian of the Middle East whose research focuses on the social, legal, and political history of Iraq. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies, The Open University of Israel and a visiting scholar in the research network "Re-Configurations: History, Memory and Transformative Processes in the Middle East and North Africa" at the Philipps-University, Marburg, in Germany. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles as well as the book Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present, published in 2012  by New York: Columbia University Press. You can read more about Dr. Efrati as well as excerpts from her book  on her personal site at academia.edu.

Dr. al-Ali's name came up again and again as I was looking for scholars on the subjects of feminism and Iraqi history. She is professor of Gender Studies at SOAS, the world-renowned School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She is a member of the London Middle East Institute; Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies; Center for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies; and the Center for Palestine Studies. In addition to Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, published by Zed Books in 2007, she is co-author, with Nicola Pratt, of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, published in 2008 by the University of California Press.

Follow this link to the program archive to hear what these brilliant and original scholars found as they traveled the world, interviewing history's witnesses.