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Dr. Omnia El Shakry (U.C. Davis Professor of History): “The Arabic Freud: Self and Psyche in Postwar Egypt.”

April 7, 2015- 4:30 pm

Professor El Shakry’s scholarship focuses primarily on the intellectual history of the Arab world, with a special emphasis on the history of the human sciences in Egypt. Her first book, a history of social science in Egypt from 1890-1945, is titled The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt and was published by Stanford University Press in 2007. One reviewer described this book as “a brilliant study of the tension between imperial projects and nationalist imaginings” and as one that offers “a seminal contribution to debates about the place of colonialism in the development of modern science.” Her current book project, titled Theorizing the Soul: Self and Psyche in Twentieth Century Egypt, traces the development of discourses of psychoanalysis and subjectivity in postwar Egypt as part of the transnational history of ideas and comparative social history. An essay from this project titled, “The Arabic Freud: the Unconscious and the Modern Subject,” has recently been published in the Journal of Modern Intellectual History. Additionally, she’s written many articles on the history of the human sciences, gender politics, and urbanism in Egypt. She has also expanded her work on the Middle East to include the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the contemporary visual arts, with articles appearing in e-flux, Third Text, and Nafas art magazine, and she maintains additional research interests in gender and sexuality.

Professor El Shakry is also a founding member of our Middle East/ South Asia Studies Program and is affiliated with the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory Programs on campus. In the summer of 2013 she directed an NEH Summer Institute for School Teachers, “Roots of the Arab Spring.” She recently co-organized an International symposium at UCSC Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds.