RAP Grantees (2018)
The AFAC-ACSS Research on the Arts Program is a funding opportunity that aims to support research on all art practices across disciplinary boundaries and methodological approaches on key themes of concern to, and in, the Arab region.
Grants are available to individual researchers (up to USD 15,000), teams of researchers or collectives (up to USD 25,000), and institutions (up to USD 35,000).
Grants are intended to support a maximum timeline of 18 months for individuals, teams and collectives (starting December 2018 and ending May 2020) and up to 24 months for institutions (starting December 2018 and ending December 2020).
- “Digital Arabs: A Brief History of Digitally - Conceived Architecture in the Arab World During the 1990s” by Adham Selim
- "Multiple Spaces, Continued Mobilizations: Conceptual and Stylistic Transformations in Visual and Spatial Arts in Sudan 1980-2010” by Shama Babiker
- “The Muleteer in the Lebanese Novel: Social Transformation in the Era of Global Capital” by Joan Chaker
- “A Genealogy of Palestinian Museums and Renegade Objects” by Lara Khaldi
- “We Felt Again That Everything is New” by Mary Jirmanus Saba
- “Sayed Darwish and Contemporary Youth Musical Practices in Egypt” by Widad Adas and Hazem Chahine
- “Music Sociology in Morocco: Music Learning in Secondary Education as a Model” by Hassan El Bakkari
- “A Healthy Distrust” by Reema Fadda, Rachel Dedman and Nadim Mishlawi
*** The ninth project selected is not listed here in order to protect the researcher’s safety and security while conducting the research.
Selection Committee
A multi-disciplinary Selection Committee composed of distinguished Arab scholars and practitioners with established research and publication records and experience in regional research and teaching reviewed and selected the proposals for funding.
Alia Mossallam is interested in songs that tell stories, and stories that tell of lesser known struggles behind better known events that mark World History. Her PhD dissertation explored a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through stories told and songs sung by people who contributed to milestone events of the 1952 revolution (the building of the Aswan High Dam, and the 1956 and 1967 wars in the Canal area). She has taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS), Freie Universität Berlin (FU) and held a series of history workshops ‘Ihky ya Tarikh’ with students, activists and artists in governorates all over Egypt, as an experiment in history-telling. She has also explored playwriting with Laila Soliman and Hassan El-Geretly as attempts to bring stories (and songs) of historical struggle unto the stage. Her publications include an article on youth activism in the volume Democratic Transition in the Middle East, a workers’ history of the Aswan High Dam in the Journal of Water History, and an article on history workshops in Egypt in the History Workshop Journal. She has also written for Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and Ma'azif. In 2017 and 2018, Mossallam is a EUME-FU Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, where she is working on a book on a popular history of the building of the Aswan High Dam, and starting a new project on the experience of the Egyptian Labour corps in World War I – mainly through songs, theatrics and cultural articulations of their experience on the home and war fronts.
Maya Issam Kesrouany is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her book manuscript Prophetic Translation: The Making of Modern Egyptian Literature is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (December 2018). Her current project investigates cultural production in the Levant as a form of civil mobility. Her research interests include nationalism and political imaginaries; civil society formations and the public sphere; critical translation theory; the politics of language, literary form and genre. She has taught at New York University (New York), Emory University (Atlanta, GA), the American University of Beirut (Beirut, Lebanon) and the American University of Sharjah (Sharjah, UAE).
Ismail Nashef is an Associate Professor at the Anthropology and Sociology program, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He held academic positions in different universities in the Arab World and beyond. In addition to his academic career, he is a literary and art critic, and curator. He has been part of different cultural and academic initiatives and projects in the academia and elsewhere. His research focus is on materiality, language, and ideology. He explores these as they are expressed in literature and plastic art. His current research is on art and literature in the colonial contexts, with special attention to the Arab Islamic societies, generally, and the Palestinian one, particularly. His latest publications include: Arabic: A story of a colonial mask (2017); June’s Childhood: Dar al Fata al Arabi and the genres of tragedy (2016); Images of the Palestinian Death (2015); On Palestinian Abstraction: Zohdy Qadry and the Geometrical Melody of Late Modernism (2014).
Omar Fertat is a theater researcher and a Faculty member and lecturer at Bordeaux-Montaigne University. He currently lectures on Arab cinema and theater in the Arab Studies department and the Performing Arts department. He also supervises the scientific program “L’Autre et ses représentations dans la culture arabo-musulmane” at the TELEM research center in the university. Several international conferences were organized as part of this program, in which numerous university researchers, writers and artists took part. His research interests include modern literature and performing arts in the Arab world. Omar Fertat manages the French theater magazine “Horizons/Théâtre”, which addresses world performing arts news and is issued twice a year. He also co-directs the collection “Monde Arabe/Monde Musulman”. His latest publications include “L’Autre et ses représentations dans la culture arabo-musulmane” (2016), and “Le théâtre marocain à l’épreuve du texte étranger: traduction, adaptation nouvelle dramaturgie” (2018).
Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He is Professor and currently Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut.
