Research
Dissertation | Papers | Digital Projects | Research Experience
My dissertation, “Constructing Anti-Colonial Cairo: the United Arab Republic’s Place in Anti-Colonial Movements during Decolonization and the Cold War,” examines the emergence of Cairo as a hub for anti-colonial activism in Africa in the wake of decolonization and the globalization of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most of the scholarship on the United Arab Republic’s (UAR) anti-colonialism in this period stresses Gamal Abdel Nasser’s role in the global Non-Aligned Movement and Third World, or his leadership in the Arab World. While this project builds upon and contributes to this literature, I argue that scholars have overlooked the UAR’s simultaneous involvement in African decolonization, pan-Arabism, Afro-Asianism, and the Non-Aligned Movement, and treat these movements as disparate anti-colonial projects. Consequently, most studies have marginalized the extensive networks that existed between these anti-colonial movements, as well as their shared ideational and geographic spaces.
To elucidate these connections, this project places Cairo at the center of this moment and examines how the city became a focal point for anti-colonial struggles, as a safe haven for radical anti-colonial leaders and intellectuals; a sponsor for intellectual production in support of these movements; a model of socialist development projects; and a host for numerous anti-colonial conferences and institutions. I argue that these movements were instrumental in constructing the spaces of Cairo and the UAR into symbols and places of anti-colonial activism. Through mapping the political landscape of anti-colonial Cairo, I argue that these anti-colonial movements should be perceived as connected and competing frameworks for imagining a new world, one where some form of collective unity would transform Africa and the Arab world, as well as the larger Third World, into a beacons of hope and progress for the world.
Papers
“Egypt is Africa: David and Shirley Graham Du Bois in the United Arab Republic during the 1960s”
“Cairo’s Congo Crisis”
“Towards the African Revolution: The United Arab Republic’s Role in Pan-Africanism”
“The Cairo Conference: The Role of Movement, Ideas, and Place in the United Arab Republic’s Anti-Colonial Project”
“The Essence of Tragedy: American Protestant Missionaries, American Foreign Relations, and the Arab/Israeli Conflict during the early Cold War”
“Run Off the Map: The Life of Alford Carleton and the History of American Protestant Missionaries in the Third World during the Cold War”
“Visualizing A Forgotten American Vision: Mapping American Protestant Missionaries in the Middle East post-1945 with Neatline and Geographic Information Systems”
“Lawmaking and Prohibiting in International Islam: A History of Supranational Islamic Fiqh Academies and Islamic Legal Authority in the late Twentieth Century and early Twenty-First Century”
Digital Projects
“Mapping the Mission: A Digital Project on American Protestant Missionaries” which is a spatial history project that traces the networks of American Protestant missionaries and once completed will function as a hub for scholars of missionaries.
“International Islamic Organizations History Project”, which once completed will be a hub for information, scholarly works, and teaching resources on the OIC, as well as other international Islamic organizations.
Research Experience
- British National Library, London, UK
- British National Archives, London, UK
- Library of Congress, Washington, DC
- National Archives Records Administration, Washington, DC
- Harvard Library Collections, Cambridge, MA
- Arabic Press Archive, Tel Aviv University
- David Graham DuBois Papers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
- Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA
- Archives de Maroc and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Maroc in Rabat, Maroc,
- Oberlin College Archives, OH
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