ÂÜÀòÉäÇø

Sara Farhan is a cultural and social historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in the histories of medicine, professionalization, and education. Her research explores how colonial legacies, state-building projects, and social hierarchies have shaped institutional and intellectual developments in the region. She approaches these questions through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on the intersections of medical history, legal history, and archival studies.

At the core of Farhan’s work is an interest in the role of expertise and professionalization in making modern states and societies. She examines how scientific knowledge functioned as a tool of governance and a site of contestation, particularly in relation to state-sponsored health initiatives, Cold War-era medical diplomacy, and the politics of medical education. Her scholarship also explores the ways in which legal and medical discourses constructed categories of deviance, focusing on juvenile delinquency and criminality. Additionally, she interrogates the gendered dynamics of professionalization, and the structures of medical and scientific institutions in the twentieth century.

Farhan is also engaged in the study of archives and knowledge production, particularly in the Iraqi context. Her research considers the material and political vulnerabilities of archives, the epistemic anxieties surrounding their preservation and destruction, and the broader implications of archival loss on historical memory. She is particularly interested in the ways in which state and non-state actors mediate access to knowledge, shaping historiographical possibilities.

She earned her Ph.D. from York University in 2019, where her dissertation examined medical education, professionalization, and health in late Ottoman and independent Iraq. She has experience teaching at institutions in Canada and the Middle East, offering courses on modern world history, colonialism and nationalism, the histories of medicine and public health, crime and criminality, decoloniality, intellectual history, gender and sexuality, social history of nutrition, and postcolonial historiography.