Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Participation Working Group

Pascale Ghazaleh: The Common Weal: Constituting National Resources in 19th Century Egypt

Pascale Ghazaleh is an associate professor in the Department of History at the American University in Cairo. She earned her PhD (2004) from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, writing a dissertation about merchants in Cairo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She has a BA in Political Science (1993) and a master’s degree in Arabic Studies (1997), both from the American University in Cairo. Pascale is interested in approaching questions of identity from the perspective of practice. She studied the formation and social organization of guilds, then the social networks and material culture of merchants, within this framework. She is now beginning a project that will investigate the links between property ownership and national identity in late nineteenth-century Egypt. These research interests are informed partly by Pascale’s own experience as a cultural hybrid, ever perched between two chairs – a sometimes uncomfortable but always interesting position to occupy, and one that has led her to reflect repeatedly on the modes of belonging, or the lack thereof.