The Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship is hosted by Durham University and is awarded to early career (post-doctoral) or established scholars. The Mohamed Ali Foundation is a UK charity whose aims include advancing the education of the public in the history of the Islamic World, of Egypt and of the Mohamed Ali Family in particular, especially the period of the reign of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (1892-1914).
In June 2018 the Mohamed Ali Foundation announced the launch of this Fellowship Programme, and which is established to devote scholarly attention to the Abbas Hilmi II Papers held at Durham University and to make the collection’s strengths more widely known to scholars. It is hoped that the fellows’ work will foster deeper understanding of an important period of Egyptian history, and of a transformative era in East-West relations.
The fellowship programme is based at Durham University and managed by an international Advisory Panel comprising academic subject specialists. The programme began in 2019 with the residency of the first fellow Dr Pascale Ghazaleh of the American University in Cairo: her inaugural lecture is now available online. Fellowships will be awarded over the next 5 years. An Advisory Panel, chaired by Professor Anoush Ehteshami will appoint one or two fellows each year.
Fellows will be early career (post-doctoral) or established scholars. The nature of the collection will often require good reading knowledge of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and English. The online catalogue of the collection indicates the languages of each file of material.
Fellows will research the Abbas Hilmi II Papers, on an agreed topic, and deliver a lecture at Durham University. Each lecture will ultimately form a chapter in a volume of high quality and original research to be edited by Dr Ghazaleh. In the interim the lectures will be published in the university’s Middle East Papers series. The breadth of material in the Abbas Hilmi II Papers will reward an interdisciplinary approach. Such is the richness of the photographic material in the archive that fellows are strongly encouraged to highly illustrate their work with examples from the collection. In order to guide candidate fellows an outline of the collection’s subject strengths is now provided in the fellowship application documentation. This is not intended to be prescriptive and the Advisory Panel will consider alternative suggestions so long as they are well-grounded in the Abbas Hilmi II Papers and this is evidenced in the application proposal.
The Fellowship, tenable in the Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, entitles the holder to full access during their residency to departmental and other University facilities such as Computing and Information Services and the University Library. Accommodation is provided at Durham during the Easter term (late April-late June), but fellows may request to reside elsewhere for the duration of the fellowship. All fellows will visit Durham, if only briefly, in order to deliver their lecture. Lectures and other activities elsewhere during the fellowship will be encouraged.
Fellows who do reside at Durham will also be encouraged to take a full part in academic and collegiate life, delivering the already mentioned lecture and perhaps also contributing to seminars.
Fellows will be awarded an honorarium and accommodation and all meals will be provided for the duration of the fellowship; a research travel grant is also available to each fellow.
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