Marie-Claude Souaid-Hesse

The Lebanese sociologist and anthropologist Dr Marie-Claude Souaid-Hesse was born in Beirut in 1954. After studying sociology at the Université Lyon II in France, she first taught at the University of Boukhalfa in Algeria. Since her return to Lebanon in 1980, she has worked as a teacher and researcher. In 2004, she organised the conference “Days of the Arab World” for the German Bundestag. From 1999 to 2009 she lived in Germany. After the death of her husband, the journalist Reinhard Hesse, Souaid-Hesse worked as a consultant in Berlin from 2005 – among other things, she curated the focus “Arab World” at the 9th international literature festival berlin. In 2009, she went back to Beirut, where she works in the NGOs UMAM D&R and Alpha-Association. In 2017, she received her doctoral degree in anthropology with a thesis on honour killings, war and violence in Lebanon. Title of the dissertation: “Customary punishment, contemporary violence: the case of the revenge of Ketermaya” (Supervisor: Dionigi Albera – Aix-Marseille).