Overview
Eva was born in Greece and raised between Athens and Chicago. She received her BA from Boston University in 2017, where she graduated with honors in International Relations; she also majored in Middle East Studies and minored in Modern Standard Arabic. In 2024, she received her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, through which she was awarded the FLAS fellowship for the summer of 2023 and for the 2023-2024 academic year. At UChicago, working under the supervision of Dr. Ghenwa Hayek, Eva’s master’s thesis centered around an analysis of how the Egyptian state has instrumentalized certain television series in recent years in order to promulgate a new narrative of spatial politics in Cairo. From 2024-2025, she was a CASA@AUC fellow at the American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Square campus.
Eva’s research interests at Cornell lie at the intersection of nostalgia studies, gender studies, media and film studies, and history. Broadly, she seeks to trace the personal and professional histories of female performers across song, screen, and stage throughout Egypt and the Levant in the first half of the twentieth century. In examining the intra-regional (im)mobilities of women in the Arab world’s entertainment landscape, she hopes to uncover how the lives of these “divas” have been strategically reconstructed and actively deployed in the manufacturing of a pan-Arab nationalist nostalgia both in Egypt and elsewhere.