By Dalia Said Mostafa. Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was a renowned Egyptian feminist activist, physician, writer, and novelist. But she was also a controversial figure who caused much disturbance to authorities in Egypt. This article focuses on her first short fictional work Memoirs of a Woman Doctor.
By Rim Naguib.
“On Rosenthal” is a zine on the life of Joseph Rosenthal (1872-1966): an Ashkenazi Jew who struggled for the ideals of solidarity and social justice in Egypt.
By Shamoon Zamir. Following the recently published collection of Yasser Alwan’s photography, the author shows and interprets a selection of Alwan’s work surrounding Cairo’s working class.
Eman Elnemr received her PhD in modern and contemporary history (2017) from the University of Tanta, Egypt. Her research interests address hegemonic elite projects and so-called modernization transformations, their effects on society, modes of resistance or responses to them, and public/people’s interventions in shaping them.
By Hala Auji and Shana Minkin. After giving a talk on her book during the EUME Berliner Seminar in December 2021, Shana Minkin sat down with Hala Auji to chat about Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2019.
By Khadija Mohamed Embaby and Amira Mittermaier. In times of profound uncertainty, what does God offer to believers? And how does uncertainty affect believers’ ideas about, and relations to, God?
By Carl Rommel. One does not have to spend a long time in Egypt to apprehend that football is a serious matter that stirs powerful emotions across the male population. Match shirts of Cairo’s two giant clubs, al-Ahly and al-Zamalek, are omnipresent in streets and squares throughout the country; club rivalries are a source of passionate controversies and banter in cafés, workplaces, and social media.
By Christian Junge. What are the social functions of reading literature? While many studies approach Arabic literature primarily through the lens of authors, the literary field, or sociopolitical discourses, my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research project, “Affective Readings”, shifts the focus to the readers. I ask: What do readers read, and how and why?
By Adam Mestyan. Some years ago I came across a fragmented, nineteenth-century Arabic manuscript in Cairo. The work, The Garden of Ismail’s Praise, caught my eye as one of a number of compositions written in praise of Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879), the “khedive”, or Ottoman governor, of Egypt.
By Sari Hanafi. By academic freedoms, I mean the freedom of thought and of creating new ideas and the freedom of expression through teaching, conferences, research, and publications.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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