Category: Events

This page shows upcoming events, once the event has passed, it might be updated to reflect the respective event that took place.

The Place of Cultural Pluralism in Alexandria

I will be giving this panel talk, along with Mohamed Gohar and Will Hanley, on cultural pluralism in Alexandria on 21st October 2021. Click here for registration.

“Less than a hundred years ago, most Eastern Mediterranean cities were marked by a high degree of cultural pluralism. Whereas the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern nation-states heralded its end, some cities retained their cosmopolitan nature well until the Second World War. Oral histories and communicative memories of ethnoreligious groups that constituted vital parts of these cities are still living, often wound up with unhealed and suppressed historical. At the same time, simplified and nostalgic visions of a pluralist past are sometimes held up as role models for present-day Eastern Mediterranean societies without questioning, or without regard for the challenges that they entail. Local academics and civil society organizations alike play vital roles in researching, highlighting and supporting pluralism and pluralist heritage, sometimes in defiance of nationalist historiographies and policies.”

Reimagining the Arabs: literature and social contracts

The live event (27 September 2021) at Casa Arabe in Madrid was wonderful and engaging. Along with the institute’s Karim Hauser and Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir, we discussed reimagining futures for the Arab world through literature and social contracts. I discussed the themes in my book chapter “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif.

You can watch the recorded lecture, panel discussion, and Q&A here.
English: https://youtu.be/rdE1cXWBg1c
Spanish: https://youtu.be/xzWBcEqk9Co

Reading Dystopian Impulses in Contemporary Alexandria (public lecture)

The seminar, which is hosted by the EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien, explores how the Egyptian city of Alexandria has long been subjected to utopian and dystopian tensions that permeate the arts, literature, architecture, history, and everyday language. One of the seeds of utopianism could be traced to Naguib Mahfouz’s novella Miramar (1967) that repositioned Alexandria as a welcoming safe haven and a cosmopolitan asylum that can bring back an Egyptian utopia and an alternative vision of the homeland, and made more vivid in films like Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why? (1978) that aligned with the then growing trend that represented Alexandria as a utopian desire. The question of utopianism leaped into the political realm in the 1990s that saw Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the international community take an interest in Alexandria as a lost utopia that must somehow be restored through a Greco-Roman refashioning and an uncritical revival of cosmopolitan discourse. This was a useful guise for neoliberal economics with Alexandria being the laboratory for privatisation – later rejected through the 2011 revolution that led to, albeit temporary, forms of civic utopia emerging. Yet the road from utopia to dystopia was inevitable, and this seminar seeks to understand the growing dystopian impulses of recent years that are shaped by, and in turn shape, the coastal city’s thematic peculiarities: nihilism, mutant capitalism, climate change, nostalgia, among others, in illuminating the tendency towards dystopian motifs.

Virtual book launch of “Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century”

Come join us for the virtual book launch of “Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century” on Friday 12 March, at 12pm Chicago time (8pm Cairo time) which will feature a discussion by the editors/authors Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, as well as a number of the book’s authors including Amro Ali, Ahmed Kanna, Khaled Fahmy, Hamid Dabashi, Ted Swedenburg, Laleh Khalili, Fatemeh Keshavarz, John Tofik Karam, Michael Frishkopf, Sami Zubaida, and Waleed Hazbun. The book is available through the University of California Press.

Making sense of Alexandria’s Enduring Affair with Nostalgia (public lecture)

I’m giving my first human-to-human public lecture in over a year. As in no zoom or webinar, it’s an actual physical flesh and blood presenter and audience dynamic 🙂. This will be on 24th February at the French institute, in English, and entry is free. Social distancing and masking rules apply.


“If every city was to have a defining ethos, a running theme, a word that sums up (or a major part of) the DNA of the respective city, then Alexandria could arguably be the city of nostalgia. Loss, longing, melancholia, and a yearning for anything but the present, have long been entrenched in the city’s contemporary era. This lecture will explore the dynamics that constitute the makeup of nostalgia in Egypt’s second city. It examines the socio-linguistic framework, historical imaginaries, second city syndrome, sense of civic defeat, and the flourishing of an online archival culture, among other factors, that underpin the protracted relationship between Alexandria and nostalgia.”