Prof. Mestyan co-directs with Prof. Mercedes Volait (CNRS) a project on the modern urban history of Cairo, Egypt. “La fabrique du Caire moderne” (Twitter: @cairemoderne) is a pilot project about urban development, architecture, Euro-Mediterranean entanglements and global investment in Cairo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its main goal is to combine thorough archival research with historical topographic iconography, using digital tools (visualization, GIS and TEI-XML texts), in order to produce a global urban history of the Egyptian capital. To involve the public, the project also includes a blog in which there are monthly popular posts about one aspect of urbanization, in English, Arabic, or French. The most popular post so far has been a short note on the relationship between urban space, urban sphere, and US paving machines in Cairo.
“La fabrique du Caire moderne” is jointly supported by Institut français d’archéologie orientale (Ifao, Cairo), L’information visuelle et textuelle en histoire de l’art : nouveaux terrains, corpus, outils – InVisu (CNRS, INHA, Paris), the History Department of Duke University (USA) and the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Cairo between 2019-2021. This project is also supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Office of Global Affairs / Andrew W. Mellon Endowment for Global Studies at Duke University in the academic year of 2019-2020.
History
