Egypt Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Naguib Mahfouz’s Last Dreams of Cairo

In a new translation of the author’s late writing, dreaming is an act of mapping Egyptian identity

November 11, 2025 • by Mariam Matar

The Arabic word barzakh refers to the liminal space between death and the day of judgment. In his introduction to a new collection of Naguib Mahfouz’s late-career writing on dreams, editor and translator Hisham Matar describes Mahfouz ensconced in a barzakh-like state during the final decade of his life. In ...

Uncategorized

During A Trial Not Resembling Any Other, in a Court Unlike Any Other

The first elected Egyptian president has died

July 11, 2019 • by Gamal Eid

In a building much-feared by political prisoners, infamous for being a torture pit during former dictator Hosni Mubarak's reign -- partially transformed later to a court; former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has died. In a glass cage inside an iron cage, in a court inside the Ministry of Interior’s Police Academy, ...

Feature

Giulio Regeni

Toward a Radical Use of Memory

January 24, 2017 • by Franco Palazzi and Michela Pusterla

“A highly promising young scholar of social and economic development in the Middle East,” as his obituary reads, Giulio Regeni was a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who moved to Cairo for his fieldwork, researching independent trade unions, especially that of street vendors, in post-Mubarak and post-Morsi Egypt. After disappearing on ...

Democracy

Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables

The new always appears in the guise of a miracle

April 11, 2014 • by Elzbieta Matynia

This is the prepared text answering the question "What do we really know about transitions to democracy?" for the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014.

It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that ...

Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables

Uncategorized

Egypt’s Constitutional Mess and Solutions from South Africa

February 14, 2014 • by Keith Harrington

Of the many important lessons the Egyptian people might take away from their 2014 constitutional referendum, three certainly stand out in stark relief: first, that the military owns the product of the plebiscite and must also own the political consequences; second, that no constitution or government will enjoy true legitimacy ...