Teaching
This section contains selections of courses that I taught at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences
In what is becoming an annual tradition since it was first taught in 2018, ‘Can we talk about love?’ is a critical attempt to try to have a meaningful conversation about ‘love’. The course tries to look at a wide range of texts encompassing philosophy, psychology, literature, both in Arabic and English to not only understand ‘love’ as phenomenon but to try to develop the terms and the ideas to be able to have such a conversation.
Can we talk about love?
Can we think of writing our autobiographies as an act of self-making? And if it is, what kind of process of self-making did the figures behind al-Nahda engage in? The legacy of the modernizing pioneers, al-ruwwad, could not be more politicized and the debates surrounding how they viewed their world during the early 20th C Egypt and how they choose to respond is a continuous process of contention. Through rereading their autobiographies and first-person narratives describing their lives and their visions, we try to open a space for reflection showing how they saw themselves as part of a larger historical moment and how their choices can still be meaningful today.
Reading the Self: Autobiography and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern Subject in Egypt
The course was co-developed and co-taught with Nader Andrawos
At a time when there are a lot of questions on what constitutes the phenomenon of violence, whether inflicted by the experiences of the everyday, or by the structures and institutions of the state or whether its even more “virtual”, this course offers a historical and contemporary overview to the main intellectual traditions that tried to define, outline and even critique violence, showing how complex and profoundly contested of a concept it is.
On Violence
Despite current attacks from both the left and the right, Egyptian feminism boasts a long and rich history that parallels and in many times goes beyond the nationalist struggle for independence. The rise of the modern nation-state grounded in the struggle for independence (from 1882 onward) witnessed the first manifestation of feminist organisation and the rise of feminist consciousness. Although many of the early reformers saw the role of women as “complementary” or at best secondary to the role of men, many feminists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries articulated, in a few instances, radical positions vis-à-vis the ongoing political debates about the role of women and their equal rights as citizens in a free, independent state.
Egyptian Feminism: Early and Modern Iterations (1890-1952)
We usually don’t think or meditate on death in our modern culture, with its obsession with youthfulness and longevity, there is a taboo around death. Aside from religious convictions about the inevitability of death, we don’t think much about death in our everyday life unless we encounter it personally, as when someone we know dies or collectively as in a state of war or, like now, during a global pandemic. It is then that death becomes what it always is, an essential experience for all living things. Death then goes from the personal, individual experience to something that has to be managed, monitored, combated and even legalized (as with euthanasia, for example). When is it legal to end someone’s life, or when to punish those whose actions resulted in the death of someone.
How do we talk about Death?
This workshop was co-developed and co-taught with Fouad Halbouni
A century after the first mass protests in 1919, demanding national liberation, how can we come to understand the notions of memory, identity and whose narrative gets to be written? In this workshop we try to look at the main themes and tropes on cultural memory in post-WWII, critiquing Western academic discourses and displacing key questions about grievance, history and the unspoken tale of the other in the context of Egypt and what the questions might reveal.