Omnia El Shakry
Biographic Data
| ID | 200004 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Omnia El Shakry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Omnia |
| FAMILY NAME | El Shakry |
| SIGNATURE | EL SHAKRY O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-6487-0657 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Whither Theory in a Time of Surpassing Disaster
Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature …
The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’: Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa
Inwardness: Comparative Religious Philosophy in Modern Egypt
This article centers the Islamic philosopher ʿUthman Amin in order to explore the intellectual exchange between Muslim and Christian scholars in twentieth-century Egypt. Specifically, I look at inwardness, intellectual dialogue, and interreligious friendships in a field that has traditionally been dominated by scholarship on the relationship between Islam and politics or Islam and the law. I elucidate Amin’s philosophy of inwardness and its atten…
The Ethnographic Moment
History and the Lesser Death
In “Theses,” section iii, the collective reflects upon the interconnected practice of critical theory and history. “Critical historians . . . recognize that they are psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study. . . . Psychically, historians should acknowledge and try to work through, rather than simply act out, their unconscious investments in their material. . . . Ethically, historians bear a r…
Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East
Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism, Secularism
Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of t…
Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt
This article imagines psychoanalysis geopolitically by way of an exploratory foray into the oeuvre of Sami-Ali, the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalytic writings, and translator of the poetry of Sufi masters. Taken together, his writings enable a critical rethinking of the role of the imaginary, the mechanisms of projection, and the epistemology of non-know…
The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt
In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ʿArabi— al-la-shuʿur —as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. This book challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blend…
History without Documents”: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East
Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007) and editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project, The Arabic Freud, traces …
Queering the Human Security State
Book Review| January 01 2015 Queering the Human Security State The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Amar, Paul. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 328 pp. Omnia El Shakry Omnia El Shakry Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2015) 21 (1): 174–176. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2818612 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supp…
The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject
This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs . Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasiz…
Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times
Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovern…
The dawn of the Arab uprisings: End of an old order
Rethinking Entrenched Binaries in Middle East Gender and Sexuality Studies
In his groundbreaking piece ‘Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?’ Paul Amar (2011b) builds upon recent scholarship in Middle East gender and sexuality studies, while int...
Imagining “the Political” Otherwise
The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for the…
Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt
A public discourse of "youth crisis" emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, "adolescence" had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly c…
Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics by Beth Baron
Book Review| July 01 2008 Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics by Beth Baron Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics, Baron, Beth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 287. ISBN 0520238575. Omnia El Shakry Omnia El Shakry University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2008) 4 (2): 106–108. https://doi.org/10.2979/MEW.2…
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
This study charts the development of the human sciences - anthropology, human geography, and demography - in late 19th and 20th century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, it examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum, to architectural designs, to that pinnacle of social scientific research - 'the article'. The book explore…
Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt
Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the muf…
Remembrance of Things Present, Longing for Things Future
History without Documents”: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East
Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007) and editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project, The Arabic Freud, traces …
Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt
A public discourse of "youth crisis" emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, "adolescence" had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly c…
Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism, Secularism
Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of t…
Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times
Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovern…
Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt
Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the muf…
The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject
This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs . Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasiz…
Whither Theory in a Time of Surpassing Disaster
Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature …
History and the Lesser Death
In “Theses,” section iii, the collective reflects upon the interconnected practice of critical theory and history. “Critical historians . . . recognize that they are psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study. . . . Psychically, historians should acknowledge and try to work through, rather than simply act out, their unconscious investments in their material. . . . Ethically, historians bear a r…
Rethinking Entrenched Binaries in Middle East Gender and Sexuality Studies
In his groundbreaking piece ‘Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?’ Paul Amar (2011b) builds upon recent scholarship in Middle East gender and sexuality studies, while int...
Imagining “the Political” Otherwise
The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for the…
Remembrance of Things Present, Longing for Things Future
Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt
Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the muf…
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
This study charts the development of the human sciences - anthropology, human geography, and demography - in late 19th and 20th century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, it examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum, to architectural designs, to that pinnacle of social scientific research - 'the article'. The book explore…
Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics by Beth Baron
Book Review| July 01 2008 Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics by Beth Baron Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics, Baron, Beth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 287. ISBN 0520238575. Omnia El Shakry Omnia El Shakry University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2008) 4 (2): 106–108. https://doi.org/10.2979/MEW.2…
Imagining “the Political” Otherwise
The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for the…
Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt
A public discourse of "youth crisis" emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, "adolescence" had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly c…
The dawn of the Arab uprisings: End of an old order
Rethinking Entrenched Binaries in Middle East Gender and Sexuality Studies
In his groundbreaking piece ‘Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?’ Paul Amar (2011b) builds upon recent scholarship in Middle East gender and sexuality studies, while int...
Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times
Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovern…
The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject
This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs . Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasiz…
History without Documents”: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East
Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007) and editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project, The Arabic Freud, traces …
Queering the Human Security State
Book Review| January 01 2015 Queering the Human Security State The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Amar, Paul. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 328 pp. Omnia El Shakry Omnia El Shakry Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2015) 21 (1): 174–176. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2818612 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supp…
The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt
In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ʿArabi— al-la-shuʿur —as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. This book challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blend…
Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt
This article imagines psychoanalysis geopolitically by way of an exploratory foray into the oeuvre of Sami-Ali, the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalytic writings, and translator of the poetry of Sufi masters. Taken together, his writings enable a critical rethinking of the role of the imaginary, the mechanisms of projection, and the epistemology of non-know…
Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism, Secularism
Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of t…
The Ethnographic Moment
History and the Lesser Death
In “Theses,” section iii, the collective reflects upon the interconnected practice of critical theory and history. “Critical historians . . . recognize that they are psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study. . . . Psychically, historians should acknowledge and try to work through, rather than simply act out, their unconscious investments in their material. . . . Ethically, historians bear a r…
Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East
Inwardness: Comparative Religious Philosophy in Modern Egypt
This article centers the Islamic philosopher ʿUthman Amin in order to explore the intellectual exchange between Muslim and Christian scholars in twentieth-century Egypt. Specifically, I look at inwardness, intellectual dialogue, and interreligious friendships in a field that has traditionally been dominated by scholarship on the relationship between Islam and politics or Islam and the law. I elucidate Amin’s philosophy of inwardness and its atten…
The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’: Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa
Whither Theory in a Time of Surpassing Disaster
Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature …
History (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Islamic Studies and History (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)