Date:
Location:
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies and ILSP: SHARIAsource at Harvard Law School present
Jack Shenker
Journalist; author, The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution
Khaled Fahmy
Shawwaf Visiting Professor in Modern Middle East History, Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Professor of History, American University in Cairo
Six years on from Egypt’s January 25 revolution, the Arab World's most populous nation remains in a state of volatility, marked by an ailing economy, a security crisis, and unprecedented levels of repression. In this talk, Jack Shenker will join Khaled Fahmy to discuss Shenker's recent book The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution, which argues that conventional accounts of Egypt's turmoil must be rethought, and connecting unrest in the country with a far wider breakdown of the global political order.
Jack Shenker is an award-winning journalist based in London and Cairo, whose reporting has spanned the globe. Formerly Egypt correspondent for The Guardian, his coverage of the Egyptian revolution received multiple prizes. In 2012, his investigation into the deaths of African migrants in the Mediterranean was named news story of the year at the prestigious One World media awards. The Egyptians, published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and The New Press in the US, is his first book.
Khaled Fahmy is the Shawwaf Visiting Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He comes to Harvard from the American University in Cairo where he was the Head of the History Department there. Before AUC, Fahmy taught for five years at Princeton University, then for eleven years at New York University. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. Specifically, he has been conducting research in the Egyptian National Archives for the past twenty years on the history of law, medicine, urban planning, and public hygiene. He has published a book on the social history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the 19th century, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a biography entitled Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (Oneworld Publications, 2008), and a collection of articles on the history of law and medicine in 19th-century Egypt, The Body and Modernity, in Arabic (2004). His latest book, Bodies of Law: Science and Religion in Modern Egypt, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Co-sponsors: ILSP: SHARIAsource at Harvard Law School, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Liz Flanagan