Round Table Discussion ‘My Egypt Archive’ with Alan Mikhail (Yale)

The Research Network ‘Archives of Power/The Power of Archives’ is excited to announce that it will host esteemed historian of Ottoman environmental history, Alan Mikhail (Yale), for a round table discussion on his book My Egypt Archive, a creative exploration of the archive’s place in the making of past and present.

At once a chronicle of Egypt in the 2000s and a historian’s Bildungsroman, My Egypt Archive chronicles Mikhail’s work in the Cairo archive and reveals the workings of an authoritarian regime from inside its institutions in the decade leading up to the Arab Spring. As Mikhail dutifully collected the paper scraps of the past for his research, he witnessed how the everyday oppressions of an autocratic government led Egyptians to want to remake their society in early 2011. In telling these stories of the archive, Mikhail centers the politics of access, interpersonal relationships, state power, and the anxiety, and inchoate nature of historical research. In 2023, Mikhail received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for My Egypt Archive.

Alan Mikhail, the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University, is a widely recognized historian of the Ottoman world.  His work has helped to establish the field of Middle East environmental history and to position the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history.  He is currently working on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America.

We invite enthusiastic PhDs and RMA students, who want to read this engaging book, to join us for a conversation with Alan. No prior knowledge of Ottoman and/or Middle Eastern history is required. Attendees are invited for drinks after the seminar.

Participants can obtain 1EC for this round table discussion and will receive a pass/fail grade. Preparation includes reading the book and one additional text and formulating a set of questions, to be submitted before the discussion.

Date: Monday March 17, 2025
Time: 14:00-17:00, followed by drinks
Location: Bushuis, University of Amsterdam

Learning aims and outcomes

• Reflect on the ways in which access to the archive is shaped by political contexts;
• Reflect on the ways in which (access to) the archive itself shapes our research;
• Practice formulating a set of questions/discussion points;
• Practice participating in a collegial academic discussion/Q&A.

Assessment, assignments & literature

The assignments consists of reading the literature (see below) and submit a set of discussion questions before the round table (deadline 10 March)

• Alan Mikhail, My Egyp Archive (Yale University Press, 2024) 184 pages
• Angela Garcia, “The Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive”, Cultural Anthropology4, 571-594.