When you think of a researcher, most people think of professors in universities. When you think of academic books, you think of books with chapters. Our guest today disrupts these assumptions and does it with an urban history flair.
Welcome to Knowledge and its Producers, a limited series from the Maydan produced by me, NA Mansour. In each episode, we’ll be talking to people who are at the forefront of knowledge production, typically away from the traditional educational power structures. We will be talking to people who curate, who edit, who run research centers, who write, and more. My field is Islamic studies and we’ll be talking to people who fit into the study of Islam and the Muslim-majority world. That doesn’t mean they’ll be Muslim themselves or Arab or Turkish; it just means we don’t have perfect terms for describing this big intersecting world. Yet. The goal is to get a wide variety of people talking about different ways of accessing history, ideas, and more. To uplift the people we’re interviewing. And to inspire you.
Mohamed ElShahed is an independent historian and curator and is well known for his website Cairobserver. We’re going to be talking to him about his book today, Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide out now from the American University in Cairo Press.
Thank you for listening and again a big thank you to Mohamed. You can follow Mohamed on Twitter @Cairobserver. You can follow me @NAMansour26 and you can follow the Maydan @themaydan on twitter. The production team includes Micah Hughes who you can follow @MicahAHughes and Ahmet Tekelioglu and most importantly, audio editor who does our post-production, Sophie Potts. A big thank you to the Luce Foundation. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Be sure to subscribe or follow The Maydan on social media for upcoming episodes and more in the Maydan’s selection of podcasts.
