Department of Near Eastern Studies

Overview

Ziad Fahmy is an Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History at the department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy received his History Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where his dissertation “Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism” was awarded the  Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2008) from the Middle East Studies Association. His first book, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Professor Fahmy is currently beginning another book project tentatively titled, Listening to the Street: Sound, Noise, and Soundscapes in Inter-Revolutionary Egypt, 1919-1952.  His research has been ‎supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Research Center in Egypt. 

Research

• Nationalism and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth century Middle East
• Trans-nationalism and the fluidity of identity in the nineteenth century Mediterranean World

Selected Publications

Book

     Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)

 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles: 

• “Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality and ‘Legal Chameleons’ in Precolonial Alexandria, 1840-1870” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no.2 ‎(April 2013): 305-329.

   

• “Coming to our Senses: Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East” in History Compass 11, no.4 (April 2013): 305-315.

• “Media Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1908-1918” in The International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 01 (2010): 83-103.

•  “Francophone Egyptian Nationalists, Anti-British Discourse, and European Public Opinion 1885-1910: The Case of Mustafa Kamil and Ya‘qub Sannu‘” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East [Duke University Press] 28, no. 1 (2008): 170-183.