Caïro

In my ethnography of Coptic social services, I explore the forms of pastoral care deployed by the Coptic Orthodox Church to create spaces where the central element of the Christian tradition--the commandment to love--is realized in a life of sharing. I look at two main forms of …

Borrowing from the work of Timothy Mitchell, this project will examine a series of recently published Egyptian novels that take the district of Wust al-Balad in Cairo as one of their central objects. I will seek to show a causal relationship between the transformations in the ci…

Through a case study of eighteenth-century Cairo, this dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual roles of the sciences in the early modern Ottoman milieu on the eve of widespread direct European political involvement in the region. Most studies of Islamic science end w…

Fifty-one Egyptian women, from all social groups and classes, living in the greater Cairo region during 1993–94 were intensively and extensively interviewed to ascertain their conceptualization of female identity (“femininity”) as well as the status, rights, and roles of women i…

This work is about boundaries in architecture. It explores the order of producing boundaries (or borders) in contemporary buildings in Egypt. In this work, I understand a border to be a space that lies between various social domains and in which these domains—divergent overlappi…

The 20th century has come to an end on a city that has witnessed dramatic and sometimes violent shifts during its long history. During the past century, specifically in the latter half, Cairo, Egypt's capital and its largest city, underwent radical waves of transformation. Three…

This dissertation examines the rise of consumerism, and in particular, the development of the Egyptian woman as a housewife and consumer from 1863 to 1922. My focus is on middle to upper class urban women, mainly in Cairo and Alexandria. I examine the ways in which both the educ…

Neoplastic intervention is derived from the medical term of neoplasm, which is an abnormal growth that continues to grow and evolve after the initial stimuli ceases. Architecturally, this neoplastic intervention at a more localized region will serve as scaffolding to catalyze re…

Through an ethnography of a Cairo neighborhood that was constructed by the Egyptian state, funded by international organizations (IOs), and is home to numerous small workshops and enterprises, this dissertation problematizes the following issues. Why have "informal economy" and …

This dissertation is a study of large, state-led projects that are meant to shape the growth, form, and identity of Egypt's capital city, Cairo, with a focus on the latter years of President Hosni Mubarak's rule. It focuses on downtown regeneration schemes, strategic vision plan…

This dissertation is about Sudanese refugees in Cairo and is based on ten months fieldwork carried out between August 2003 and June 2004. It highlights the resilience and hope that distinguish refugees' lives despite the odious experience they face on a daily basis. The disserta…

In this dissertation I review the debate on cultural globalization and discuss the concept of hybridity within the context of the American University in Cairo (AUC). The broad research goal has been to document and interpret the everyday lives of AUCians in the context of place …

This thesis examines the topographical development of the major artery of the city of Cairo, the Shāri` al-A`zam, throughout its history from the beginning of the Fatimid period in 969 AD to the end of the Mamluk period in 1517 AD. The thesis focuses on the section of the street…

The phenomenon of street children is world-wide and on the increase despite numerous programs aiming at its eradication. The failure to adequately address this complex and very diverse phenomenon is the result of conceptual confusion with respect to defining who a street child i…

This study is an analysis of the social construction of ethnicity among two groups of Muslim Arab Sudanese in modern-day Cairo: long term expatriates who immigrated to Egypt in the 1940s and recently arrived exiles fleeing political and economic upheaval in Sudan. The study is b…

Architects, environmental researchers, and managers of work environments are increasingly interested in the relationship between the physical conditions in offices and organizational productivity and employees' satisfaction. For the past 30 years their quests to determine this r…

Recent historiography has started to see crafts and guilds in the nineteenth century in the Middle East as more than just the declining remnants of a traditional past. On the basis of new (and old) sources—censuses, petitions and contemporary accounts—this dissertation discusses…

This thesis is a new study of the mosque of Ibn Tulun, which was built in 265 A.H./868 A.D., as it was created and as it developed over the centuries. It examines the mosque from a bibliographical, topographical, and architectural point of view, focusing on the architecture itse…

This dissertation examines the talk about everyday conflict of 26 American women and 26 English-speaking Egyptian women who lived in the vicinity of Ma'adi, Cairo, Egypt in 1995. Two questions provided the primary focus of the research: (1) Are there distinctive American and Egy…