Program

10.00-10.15 -- Welcome and introduction / Lamia Eid & Pascale Ghazaleh
10.15-10.45 -- al-Ahram as a source for the study of World War I in the Middle East / Michael Reimer
10.45-11.00 -- Newspaper Archives as Sources for Students of History / History students
11.00-11.20 -- The early years of Vekay-ı Mısriyye/الوقائع المصريّة  (1828-1832): My Archival Journey.  / Abdul Halim Bohari
11.20-11.40 -- The History of a Private Archive: Nagah El Beshbishi and his Newspaper Collection / Amal El Beshbishi
11.40-12.10 -- al-Shiʻr al-manthūr in 1930s Egypt: Traces from the Kamel Family collection of al-Jāmiʻah and other journals / Nevine Fayek
12.10-12.40 -- Archived Scripts: A Look at Egypt’s Newspaper and Magazine Printed Letters  / Bahia Shehab
12.40-13.00 --  / BREAK
13.00-13.30 -- PFEnum: Digitization of the Francophone Press / Marie-Delphine Martelliere
13.30-14.00 -- Imperfect Digitization & Coerced Crowdsourcing: the Digital Egyptian Gazette / Will Hanley
14.00-14.30 -- Transforming Research About Arab Diasporas: The Khayrallah Center's Digital Arabic Newspaper Project / Akram Khater

About the presenters

Pascale Ghazaleh is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at AUC. Her research focuses on the social and ecponomic history of Egypt, with publications such as Held in Trust : Waqf in the Islamic World.

Michael Reimer is Professor of HIstory at the American University in Cairo, and teaches courses on state and society in the modern Middle East. His published works include Colonial bridgehead : government and society in Alexandria and The first Zionist Congress : an annotated translation of the proceedings.

Abdul Halim Bohari received his bachelor degree in History from Boğaziçi University (Turkey) in 2018. He continued his graduate studies in Istanbul Medeniyet University (Turkey) before he joined the M.A. program in the Middle Eastern Studies AUC.

Amal Nagah Elbeshbishi is an Economist working for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)- Office for North Africa, Morocco. She is also a tenured Professor of Economics at Faculty of Commerce- Mansoura University, Egypt. She holds a master’s and a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Fordham University- New York, and a master’s degree in Economics from Mansoura University, Egypt.

Nevine Fayek recevied her Bachelor degree from the American University in Cairo, majoring in broadcast-journalism and minoring in fine arts and Arabic language and literature. She holds a Master’s degree in Arabic studies from the Free University (FU) and a PhD from the University of Münster, Germany. Her research focuses mainly on historical literary press archives and the history of modern Arabic poetry, with special emphasis on early approaches to prose poetry. In addition, she works as a freelance translator, and is particularly interested in translating German literary works, theatre plays and children books.

Bahia Shehab is Professor of design and founder of the graphic design program at The American University in Cairo. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has received a number of international awards including the BBC’s 100 women’s list, a TED Senior Fellowship, a Prince Claus Award, and the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture. She is the founding director of TypeLab@AUC. Her latest publications include You Can Crush the Flowers: A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution and the award winning co-authored book A History of Arab Graphic Design.

Marie-Delphine Martelliere is head of the archives service, digitization unit and Francophone Press of Egypt Program at the Centre d’Études Alexandrines. An egyptologist by training, she worked at IFAO before joining the CEAlex in 2013. Together with J.-Y. Empereur she co-edited the volume Presses allophones de Méditerranée (2017), and has contributed to a number of collaborative digital projects, including Bibliothèque d’Orient, under the aegis of the BnF.

Will Hanley is a legal and social historian of the Middle East. He is associate professor of History at Florida State University. He is engaged in a variety of digital projects, including an undergraduate historical newspaper encoding project (dig-eg-gaz.github.io) and a digital gazetteer of the Ottoman empire (ottgaz.org). His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Forum Transregionale Studien, the DAAD, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Akram Khater is University Faculty Scholar, Professor of History, and holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University where he also serves as the Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. He is past editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and current editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migrations, and sits on the editorial board of a book series on immigration studies. Most recently, he has received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) to develop Arabic handwriting text recognition. This research builds on the already developing Arabic OCR for print matters.