Billie Melman is a professor of modern history at Tel Aviv University, the author of Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties (1988) and Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, Sexuality, Religion and Work, 1718–1918 (1992, second edition 1995) and editor of Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace 1870–1930 (1998). She has written extensively on gender and colonialism and in nationalist movements, gender, culture and society, and on the development of women’s and gender history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her writings have covered both British history and the history of the Middle East and of Erez Israel/Palestine. She was a founding member and the first chair of the section of gender and women’s history of the Historical Society of Israel.