Dr Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights. Before joining LSE, she was a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London, and previously, an Assistant Professor in International Human Rights Law and Justice at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Mai was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard University. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto.
Mai has written on international law and empire, human rights, labour movements, class and gender relations, and care work and social reproduction. She is influenced by law and society approaches, law and Marxism, Marxist feminism, post-colonial thought, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Currently, Mai is working on three projects. The first is on the history of work and labour rights during the interwar period and the post-colonial moment in the Middle East. She works with film, literature and artefacts as alternative archives that show how law and legality have been historically implicated in structures of violence.
The second project is a socio-legal history of refusal and revolt in Mandate Palestine, focusing on the home as a site of resistance and a space from which an alternative anti-colonial imaginary was assembled and sustained. Mai centres Palestinian women as creative agents who radically reimagined the Arab home as a space of resistance and repurposed their labour of social reproduction as struggle.
Finally, Mai is working on the relationship between communist organizing and the articulation of human rights demands in the Middle East. She look at how some communists assembled a different vision of human rights, internationalism, and solidarity from the one dreamed up by international lawyers that so comfortably embodied a civilizational hierarchy founded upon liberal internationalism and free trade.
Selected Writings
Taha, M. (forthcoming 2021) ‘The Comic and the Absurd: On Colonial Law in Revolutionary Palestine’ Osgoode Hall Law Journal.
Taha, M. (forthcoming 2021) ‘Human Rights and Communist Internationalism: On Inji Aflatoun and the Surrealists’ in Immi Tallgren, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (Oxford University Press).
Taha, M. (2021) ‘Law, Class Struggle and Nervous Breakdowns’ in Anne Orford, Kathryn Greenman, Anna Saunders and Ntina Tzouvala (eds.), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge University Press).
Taha, M. (2020) ‘Reflections on Marxism and Law’. Legal Form.
Taha, M. (2019) ‘From Cairo to Jerusalem: Law, Labour, Time and Catastrophe’. Law and Critique, Issue No. 9.
Taha, M. (2019) ‘Social Reproduction and Empire in an Egyptian Century’. Radical Philosophy (co-written with Sara Salem).
Taha, M. (2019) ‘Drinking Water by the Sea: Real and Unreal Property in the Mixed Courts of Egypt’ in Daniel S. Margolies, Umut Özsu, Maïa Pal and Ntina Tzouvala, Standards and Sovereigns: Legal Histories of Extraterritoriality (Routledge).
Taha, M. (2017) ‘Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work in Egypt: law and the woman between the factory and the ‘social factory’’’ in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press).
Taha, M. (2016) ‘Reading Class in International Law: The Labour Question in Interwar Egypt’. Social and Legal Studies: An International Journal, Vol. 25, No. 5.
Taha, M. (2014) ‘The Egyptian Revolution in and Out of the Juridical Space: An Inquiry into Labour Law and the Workers’ Movement in Egypt’. International Journal of Law in Context, Vol. 10, No. 2.