Sofia J. Smith

Sofia J. Smith is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she works at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory on questions of gender, media, and authoritarianism. Her dissertation, Performance Anxieties: Celebrity, Appearance, and Citizenship in Modern Egypt, attends to practices of attention, judgment, imitation, and denunciation of public women as acts of authoritarian citizenship. Anchored in the prosecution of Egypt’s so-called “TikTok Women” — more than 200 working-class content creators arrested for violating cybercrime and “family values” laws — it theorizes authoritarianism as a relational order produced through ongoing struggles over public appearance, authority, and aspiration. Drawing on more than twenty-two months of fieldwork with the gender vigilantes organizing popular campaigns against these women, feminist activists and organizations working to defend women’s freedom on and offline, and ambivalent citizens both groups seek to recruit, the dissertation argues that Egyptians asymmetrically co-construct a national grammar of appearance that structures the gendered and classed norms of respectability through which the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are distributed.

Situating the contemporary moment’s “crowdsourced repression” of content creators within a longer history in which female celebrity has served as a focal point for disputes over class mobility, gendered respectability, and the visibility of aspiration in public life, the dissertation’s historical comparison traces an evolving star system — the conjuncture of media technology, regime project, market structures, audiences, and performers through which celebrity is created, maintained, and disciplined over time.

Smith’s previous work examines popular media as a site where sexual norms, citizenship, and community boundaries are represented and contested in everyday life. Her co-authored article “‘It’s Just How Things Are Done’: The Social Ecology of Sexual Violence in Humanitarian Communities” (International Studies Quarterly, 2023) examines the normalization of gendered violence in aid work. “The Danish Experience: Foreign Women and Egyptian Nationalism” (Majallah, 2025) analyzes a blockbuster comedy as a site where anxieties about national belonging and sexual propriety are negotiated in public. Winning the Kathy Anderson Award for Best Master’s Thesis, Smith’s “#Dawa: Women, Islam, and Authority on Instagram,” traces how Muslim women construct religious authority through social media.

In 2026–27, she will be a Residential Fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and a PhD Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. Her research has been supported by the Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), and the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ).