Sarah NAGATY

Sarah Nagaty is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the ERC-Project entitled “WO-NAM – Women and Non-Alignment in the Cold War era: biographical and intersectional perspectives” (PI Chiara Bonfiglioli). She is a cultural historian of Egypt in the 20th century with particular interest in liberation movements and social change. She is currently working on women movements within national resistance in Egypt from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War in 1991. 

She received full-funding from the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal) for a joint doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen (Under the supervision of Prof. Frederik Tygstrup) and UCP Lisboa (Under the supervision of Prof. Peter Hanenberg). She was awarded her doctoral degree in April 2023 for her thesis " The Collective Dream: Egyptian Longing for a Better Life " which was published as a book later in the same year. The Collective Dream proposes an alternative way for theorizing historical revolutionary transformations which takes into consideration experiencing political change in everyday life for the wider masses which are neither politically active nor in possession of the luxury of time and intellectual endeavours. Egypt's Nasserite era of the 1950s and the 1960s along with the Revolution of January 2011 are the cases discussed. Both her Bachelor degree (The University of Alexandria, Egypt) and her MA degree (The University of Sheffield, the UK) were completed with dissertations on writing political dissent either in Egypt in the 1960s or in Somalia under the rule of Siad Barre. 

Nagaty led research projects at the Library of Alexandria for the Harvard-affiliated platform edX and worked with community protection at the UNHCR, Alexandria office.