13.06. Lucia Carminati (A Global Checkpoint at Port Said: Labor Mobility and the Suez Canal After 1869)

This session will be online: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=m1c2374fd50a91f5a9bb8e432ffe40a2b

Abstract for Lucia Carminati’s talk:

In 1859, nowhere on maps was newly minted Port Said to be found. The town, already teeming with life, lay on the northern Egyptian shore. It had been just founded as the first worksite run by the Universal Company of the Maritime Canal of Suez, overseeing the excavation of a north-south waterway across the Isthmus of Suez. In 1906, a standard-gauge railway connected the seemingly isolated Port Said to the rest of Egypt. Overall, even if this town happened to attract fortune seekers over the course of its history, it failed to meet the expectations of its planning and birth. Yet Port Said’s unfulfilled promise and ambiguous status as a city that was both connected and disconnected provide incentives to reposition this apparently obscure place into the limelight of the Middle Eastern stage. 

Biography of Lucia Carminati:

She is associate professor in migration history at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History of the University of Oslo. Previously assistant professor at the History Department of Texas Tech University, she was a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute between 2018 and 2020 after having completed a Ph.D. in modern Middle East history at the History Department of the University of Arizona. Among other projects, she is finalizing a manuscript titled Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859-1906: Labor Mobility and the Making of the Suez Canal. 

For further information or questions, please do not hesitate to contact Michael Goebel at: michael.goebel@fu-berlin.de and Timothy Nunan at: timothy.nunan@fu-berlin.de. We look forward to seeing you on Monday evening.