Alia Mossallam

Board Member

Alia Mossallam is a historian interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She is currently an Research fellow of  the  EUME program of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, writing a book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. She is also starting a new public history project tracing the experiences of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through oral history, songs and memoires that recount their struggles. Some of her writings can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Jadaliyya, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr. She has tried her hand at playwriting with David Grieg, Hassan El-Geretly, Laila Soliman and written her first short-story “Rawi” with 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Freie Universität in Berlin.