Room 149
Shehab Ismail is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Department III. His research combines perspectives from history of science, technology, and medicine, urban history, modern Middle East history, and digital history. His research examines how public health crises and real estate investment intersected in Cairo and reshaped the city during the British colonial period. Focusing on the work of civil engineers, and the sanitary infrastructures they designed, he highlights how engineers test their epistemologies and reflect on the function and reach of their technologies.
Ismail received his PhD from Columbia University’s Department of History in 2017. Thanks to a grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), he launched the public, digital history project Al-Madaq: A Virtual Tour of Cairo’s History in March 2020. The website features an open access cartographic archive of historical Cairo, essays, and the work of collaborating artists. Before joining the MPIWG, his work was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Projects
Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1880s–1920s
Past Events
Early Career Seminar
- Institute Event
Horses in Bohai and Jurchen Societies: Based on Osteological Studies from the South Part of the Russian Far East
MOREEarly Career Seminar
- Institute Event
Sanitary Engineers and the Growth of Colonial Cairo: A Hydraulic Approach
MOREEarly Career Seminar
- Institute Event
Camels as Leaders: Distributed Skills in Human-Camel Cooperative Relationships in Somaliland
MOREEarly Career Seminar
- Institute Event
Colligation in Model Analysis: from Whewell’s Tides to the San Francisco Bay Model
MOREColloquium
German and Egyptian Sexologists and the Boundaries of the Sexual Instinct: Early Twentieth Century Encounters
MOREWorkshop
Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East
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