British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Email: Aya dot Nassar at warwick dot ac dot uk

Blog

Twitter: @A_M_NassarLink opens in a new window

 

I am interdisciplinary scholar in between politics and IR, Urban and and Political Geography, and Middle East studies. I write about questions of memory, archiving, poetics of space, infrastructure and affective and material aspects of cities. My doctoral research included investigating the archives of national Egyptian architects who were designing plans for post-colonial/post-independence Cairo. My post-doctoral research focused on the aesthetics and poetics used to represent and depict Arab cities after 2011, neighbourhood storytelling and memory in Coventry, and Space and memory work in Egypt. I am firmly guided by a postcolonial framework in my research and political commitments and I am inspired by decolonial and feminist approaches in teaching and research.

I did my PhD in PaIS (2019), and I re-joined PaIS in 2023 as British Academy post-doctoral fellow to conduct the research project "When the city stands still" (2023-2025). Prior to the fellowship, I worked as a Lecturer in the Geohumanities in RHUL, a Lecturer of Human Geography in Durham University, and a Teaching Fellow in the School of Global Studies, Sussex University. I have a broad teaching experience in Social, Cultural, Urban and Political Geography as well as research-led teaching in Geographies of Development and Critical Geographies of the Middle East.

In the past, I have co-convened the Warwick Political Geography groupLink opens in a new window in PaIS (2015-2018), and I co-initiated and co-convened the Geography and Middle East Seminar Series (2020-2021) with Dr Olivia Mason in Durham and Newcastle Universities. I am currently one of the editorial team of Arab UrbanismLink opens in a new window, a bi-lingual open access platform that publishes on urban questions in the Arab World.

Recent Publications:

Anderson, B., Awal, A., Cockayne, D., Greenhough, B., Linz, J., Mazumdar, A. et al. (2022) Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms. The Geographical Journal, 00, 1– 18. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12493

Nassar, A. (2022) Essential Readings on Cities and Materiality: The Making and Unmaking of Urban Space in the Middle East and North Africa Jadaliyya and Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI).

Carpi, E., Fawaz, M., Fregonese, S., Ingram, A., Nassar, A., & Mason, O. (2022). Review forum: War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon, Sara Fregonese, IB Tauris (2019) Political Geography, online 29 October 2022, 102777.

Nassar, A. (2022) A Geopoetics of Dust Disembodied Territories.