Rula Quawas, a prominent academic and champion of women’s advancement in Jordan who was removed as dean of the University of Jordan over a video project in which her female students exposed the sexual harassment they endured on campus, died on July 25 in Amman, Jordan. She was 57.

The cause was complications of a biopsy she was having performed in which her aorta ruptured, her brother Audeh said.

Rula Butros Quawas (pronounced KWA-wahs) was born in Amman on Feb. 25, 1960, into a patriarchal society — women were not given the right to vote until 1974 — that as an adult she would refuse to accept.

“I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to write about women,” she said in a 2011 interview with Broad Recognition, an independent feminist blog at Yale. “Feminism is something that you drink and you eat every day; for me, it was a given.”