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, Gender, and Relations of Rule in Modern Egypt, examines celebrity as a site where political life is not only represented but enacted. It asks how practices of attention, judgment, imitation, and denunciation surrounding public women mediate relations among citizens, moral norms, and state power.

The project is anchored in the prosecution of Egyptian “TikTok women,” working-class content creators charged under cybercrime and “family values” legislation. Rather than exceptional moral panic, these cases are situated within a longer history in which female celebrity serves as a focal point for disputes over class mobility, gendered respectability, and the visibility of aspiration in public life.

The contemporary moment is distinctive not in the existence of these struggles, but in the intensity and immediacy of participation they generate. Platform media collapses distance between spectatorship and intervention: users circulate videos, issue complaints, mobilize state attention, defend creators, and participate in collective judgment in ways that blur conventional distinctions between state and society. Authority, in this context, emerges less as a fixed institutional location than as an effect of distributed practices of recognition, amplification, and condemnation.

Drawing on Arendtian political theory and its feminist and postcolonial extensions, Performance Anxieties argues that authoritarian rule is best understood as a relational order produced through ongoing struggles over public appearance and authority. The dissertation develops two concepts: “moral security assemblage,” describing the distributed practices through which citizens construct targets and demands for punishment, and “citational authority,” which captures how platform circulation enables working-class women to become shared reference points for aspiration, critique, and feminist solidarity across classed regimes of respectability. The project draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, Arabic-language press archives, and historical comparison across four Egyptian media regimes.

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).