Alia Mossallam

P98a Lecture Hall
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, pedagogue and writer, interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She is working on her book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. Her new project at EUME (2021-23), “Tracing Emancipation Under Rubbles of War”, retrieves the physical and political journeys of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoires that recount their solidarities and struggles. Some of her writings can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and currently at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

This event is sponsored by the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.