I am a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School for Global Intellectual History at Freie Universität Berlin. I hold a BA in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University in Cairo and an MA in Global History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. My research sits at the intersection of urban history and the history of emotions in Egypt and the wider Arab region. Alongside my academic writing, my creative writing has been published by Montez Press, AVL Verlag, and most recently the Amsterdam Museum Journal.

Research Project

Tentatively titled “In Pursuit of a Doctrine of Progress: An Intellectual History of Urbanism and Emotion during the Infitah (1974–1981),” my dissertation examines the conceptual development of “the modern” through the lens of Egyptian urbanism and the built environment. I trace the concept of “modernity” (ḥadātha) from the Nahḍa period in order to establish the historical relationship between modernization and the built urban form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As liberation movements sought to establish the nation-state form in the early twentieth century, this wave of decolonization was interrupted by the Naksa in 1967, which had significant implications for urbanist thought in its aftermath. I turn to Egypt’s postwar Infitah period to examine the rise of “the modern” in light of the 1967 and 1973 wars and their impact on urbanist thought and the city. To better understand Cairo in this postwar historical moment, I begin with the state’s manifesto, “The October Working Paper,” and turn to the emotional experiences of Cairo’s residents to understand the affective dimensions of the Naksa and the ways in which its afterlives persist in Cairo’s built environment.