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POSTDOCTORAL
fellows
2024/2025
Amr
Khairy
Amr Khairy Ahmed holds a PhD in human ecology (Lund University). He researches social and cultural histories of energy and technology in nineteenth-century Egypt, from the interdisciplinary perspective of Anthropocene History. His PhD thesis “Egypt Ignited: How Steam Power Arrived on the Nile and Integrated Egypt into Industrial Capitalism (1820s-76)” presented a social history of the arrival of fossil fuels to Egypt, through industrialisation, agrarian production, debts, and colonialism across the nineteenth-century. His ongoing projects include questions of solar energy for agriculture in contemporary arid environments, and the conceptual history of macroeconomics and engineering in Egypt.
Yasmin
Shafei
Yasmin Shafei holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the American University of Beirut. She received her MA and BA in International Relations from the American University in Cairo. Her research focuses on intersections of colonial studies and the histories of medicine and mental health. Specifically, her dissertation explored primary documents at the National Archives in Egypt and the United Kingdom to investigate the impact of British colonial rule on the development of psychiatry and Egypt’s state asylums during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through an analysis of a wide range of primary sources, her dissertation also examined the lived experiences of both patients and their families, further interrogating the impacts of class and gender. Prior to embarking on her Ph.D. journey, she spent 15 years working with Oxfam and several United Nations agencies on regional issues related to refugees, gender, education, and health.
2023/2024
Dina
Bakhoum
Dina Bakhoum holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Universities of Leiden and Paris-1. She is also an engineer and specializes in cultural heritage conservation and management, with long field experience in Cairo and Upper Egypt (2000-present). Her research and publications look at Egypt’s Islamic, Coptic and modern architecture, the waqf (endowment) as a maintenance system, and the history and policies of heritage conservation. Her Ph.D. analyzes the restoration interventions of the Egyptian Comité de conservation des monuments de l’art arabe from the 1880s to the 1950s. Her post-doctoral fellowship is jointly funded by the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) and CEDEJ.
Sophie
Frankford
Sophie Frankford holds a DPhil in Anthropology (University of Oxford), a MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford), and a BMus in Music (King’s College London). Her research centers on music in Egypt, with a particular focus on social class, urban space, and issues of modernity. She has taught at the University of Oxford and the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and has articles forthcoming in the journals Ethnography, Popular Music, and Égypte Soudan Mondes Arabes (ESMA).
Maya
CHEHADE
Maya Chehade holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po Paris). She specializes in migration studies and has also worked with the private sector and with international donor organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region. In her Ph.D., Maya used an ethnographic method and a comparative analysis to understand the entrepreneurial trajectories of Syrian refugees in Egypt and Jordan between 2011 and 2023.
