Doctoral Student in History Wins Fulbright to Study in Egypt

Matthew Parnell, a doctoral student in history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has just been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Student Grantee to Egypt for 2010-11. There, he will begin work on his dissertation, "The Emergence of Youth Political Activism and Youth Culture in Egypt, 1892-1919."

Parnell's dissertation is being supervised by professor Joel Gordon. History's resident Africanist professor Andrea Arrington also wrote in support of Parnell's Fulbright application.

In the dissertation, Parnell focuses on Egyptian youth al-shabab and the development of youth culture in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, he concentrates on new understandings, ideals, activities and representations of youth during this period from the perspectives of the young people themselves. Youth had often been the recipients and targets of colonist and nationalist projects, but how did youth engage, employ and contest such schemes? In addition, did new developments in the Egyptian public sphere, education and bourgeois consumption patterns lead to the development of a distinctive youth culture?

Modern Egyptian history is rich in textual sources due to the burgeoning of mass media capitalism. Thus, Parnell's first aim is to examine the prominent periodicals and articles written by Egyptian youth in Arabic fusha between 1890 and 1923 and found today in the Arabic Language Periodicals collection at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo. Secondly, he will turn his attention to media expressing Egyptian mass culture in colloquial Egyptian Arabic: the satirical press, vaudeville plays, songs, and colloquial poetry.

These sources are under researched but rich in politicized popular language, content, and symbolism. By probing the works of Egyptian youth within these genres, Parnell hopes to find a more nuanced picture of collective youth identities since colloquial media had a wider net of ideological dissemination. These sources are located at Dar al-Kutub in the Arabic Phonograph collection and the Arabic Language Periodical collections housed there.

Finally, Parnell will investigate Egyptian police records from the era in the hopes of gaining a picture of how new ideas of youth, youth political activism, and nationalism were disseminated and practiced in social spaces such as the coffeehouse, square, or street. By examining textual and non-textual media, Parnell's study will highlight youth as an essential force within political, social, and cultural contexts during this critical point in modern Egyptian history.