• Date: March 14th, Tuesday, 2023, 16:00 – 17:30
• Location: Room 304, SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Accounts of modern Egyptian history are rife with movements and states mounting claims and counterclaims to power, sovereignty, and freedom. Prisons are central to this history. Indeed, no history of 20th century Egypt is free of: “large waves of arrests”, “imprisoned intellectuals”, “great repression campaigns”, and so on. But rarely do they follow up: and then what? Yet power contestation does not cease at the moment of arrest; life does not end at the prison’s gates. That is, prisons do not spell the death of politics or, even necessarily, of bodies. If anything, the space of the prison was a pivotal site of subject formation, power contestation and cultural production in Egypt and across the postcolonial Middle East. Prisons, then, might be reconstrued alongside such spaces as the coffeehouse and the mosque as spatial anchors of Middle East history. So what do prisons do? What kind of social and political order do they produce and reproduce? Much is made and unmade in prison: political subjectivities, networks and organisations, cultural production, disciplinary regimes, hegemonic orders and normative genders. Carcerality is productive of self, society and state. This talk will explore the relationship between carceral modernity and wider gender regimes in Egypt.

Hannah Elsisi is a social, intellectual and gender historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa in the world. Her research and teaching focus on global histories of gendered, carceral and capitalist regimes of power, mobility and subjectivity. Hannah is Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi and visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London. Before that she was Assistant Professor in Middle East History at King’s College London (2018-2020) and took her PhD from the History Faculty at Oxford (Merton College) in 2020. Her thesis was awarded the Malcolm Kerr and Leigh Douglas awards for best dissertation in Middle East Studies by MESA and BRISMES respectively. On completing her PhD in 2020 she joined Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where she remains a fellow and an affiliate assistant professor in the History faculty and advisory board member at the Centre for Gender Studies. Hannah is an elected member of BRISMES’ committee on academic freedom. Publications include ‘They Threw Her in with the Prostitutes” Genre et Histoire, 2020 and “The Man and the Ant” JMEWS, 2023 and, forthcoming, Lovers in the Citadel: Prisons and Other Architectures of Subjection in Egypt and Behind the Sun: Prison Writing in an Egyptian Century.