The 2024 Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship Public Lectures

The Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is pleased to host the 2024 fellows Prof. Lucia Carminati and Dr Xiaoyue Li, and guest speaker Dr Dimitrios Lamprakis. Dr Li will lecture on the subject of ‘Finance, Technology, and Politics in Egyptian Railways during Abbas Hilmi II’; Prof. Carminati will lecture on the subject of ‘Egypt’s Borders and Their Crossers, 1875-1937’; and Dr Dimitrios Lamprakis will lecture on ‘Muhammad Ali Pasha’s waqfiyyah and his endowment as a testimony to his indissoluble bond with his motherland Kavala’. The lectures will take place on Thursday 20th June 2024 at 12.00 o'clock in The Al Qasimi Building, Room IM102 (Ground Floor). The lectures will also be live-streamed on Zoom: if you wish to attend online please register here. 

Finance, Technology, and Politics in Egyptian Railways during the reign of Abbas Hilmi II 

Dr Xiaoyue Li’s research focuses on the development of both public and private railway sectors during Khedive Abbs Hilmi II’s reign from 1892 and 1914. It explores the interplay of materiality, technology, capitalism, and politics that railways assembled. Taking an infrastructural approach, his study accentuates the multilayered politics in motion at British empire’s frontier that oscillated between modernity and indigeneity, capitalization and decolonization, autocratic reality and democratic ethos. Specifically using archives of Abbas Hilmi II, he further reveals the crucial roles of the Khedive and Egyptian bureaucrats in restructuring Egypt’s railway system in a period overshadowed by British financial advisors and engineering administrators. 

Egypt’s Borders and Their Crossers, 1875-1937: A History of Mobility, State, and Society 

Prof. Lucia Carminati is a historian of migration and the modern Middle East. She researches the social and cultural history of Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest work explores the ambivalent history of Egypt’s borders. It takes off in 1875, when the so-called Mixed Tribunals were founded, and ends with the abolishment of the capitulations in 1937. She examines the history of state efforts aimed at regulating movement, keeping people in or locking them out, welcoming certain goods and prohibiting others. On the other hand, she explores the efforts of border-crossers and the hindered trajectories of certain goods as they traversed borderlands that were slowly but surely morphing into borders. She strives to understand the history of the Egyptian state and society itself in light of the movements in and out of their edges. 

Mohamed Ali Pasha’s waqfiyyah and his endowment as a testimony to his indissoluble bond with his motherland Kavala 

Dr Dimitrios Lamprakis’ work explores Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Greek history. His lecture takes as its focus Mohamed Ali Pasha and his waqfiyyah endowment at his birthplace in Kavala and its particular role in his long-term strategy to strengthen his political position and dynastic ambitions. In addition to examining the waqf deed’s contents and purpose and the development and history of the institution founded at Kavala and its companion island of Thassos, Dr Lamprakis will particularly examine Mohamed Ali’s little-known affiliation with the Sufi Naqshbandiyyah Order and the sect’s influence in the theological school at Kavala and the wider role of Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the region. 

Information about the fellowship programme and past fellows is published here. The call for applications for the 2025 fellowship will be released in June after the lecture. 

Pricing: free