Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology has just published an Arabic translation (open access) of my article, ‘Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement: The March 9 Group in Egypt’. I’m glad that I was able to make this research accessible to more readers, especially readers in Egypt who have been directly affected by the events discussed in the article. The effort that I put into getting it published in Arabic will be rewarded if it contributes something to discussions about social movements in Egypt before and since the revolutionary uprising of 2011.
Read more →
The European Journal of Turkish Studies (EJTS) has just published my article ‘Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement: The March 9 Group in Egypt’ (open access), as part of a special issue on demobilization at universities in Turkey and in other countries.
What It’s About The March 9 Group for University Autonomy is a small group of Egyptian university professors who have campaigned, since 2003, against the regime’s interference in academic affairs and campus life.
Read more →
Here’s a video of a 40-minute introductory talk I gave on the Qur’an and the early history of Islam, on 30 January 2013 at the National University of Singapore. The talk was part of a lecture series called ‘Introduction to the Study of the Contemporary Middle East’, organised by the university’s Middle East Institute, where I was then a post-doc.
I didn’t try to do anything more than summarise the current state of scholarship on the topic, including the main areas of disagreement among specialists.
Read more →
This is a talk I gave at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in New Orleans on 12 October 2013, in the panel ‘The Politics of Taste in the Late Ottoman Empire and Egypt’. In under 15 minutes, it outlines the main argument of my PhD thesis and gives a few examples.
Here’s the abstract:
In the early 20th century, Egyptian effendi intellectuals used nationalism to introduce new tastes in literature, cinema, music, journalism, and other cultural practices into Egypt.
Read more →