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Hanan Sabea

  • Position: Associate Professor and Sociology-Anthropology Graduate Program Advisor Editor-in-Chief of Cairo Papers in Social Science
  • Department: Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology
  • Email: [email protected]
Brief Biography

Hanan Sabea is a professor of anthropology at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Her interests in anthropology began in Egypt, where she earned her BA and MA at AUC with research focused on development, population resettlement and the political economy of developing countries. After nine years of working in research and development projects in Egypt, she shifted her focus to Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly East and southern Africa, where she conducted research in Tanzania on land, labor and the making of histories.

Her experiences in both North and Sub-Saharan Africa have defined one of her broader intellectual concerns: how the very category of Africa has been historically constructed as an object of knowledge and as a cultural-political entity subject to a long history of interventionist and extractive politics. This is closely tied to an overarching interest in knowledge and decolonization, framed by questions of how knowledge is produced, by whom, for what purposes, when and where, and in what languages and forms.

Sabea’s research in Tanzania examined the transition from socialism to a free-market economy and polity, using sisal plantations as a microcosm for broader transformations. She explored how people construct their histories under colonial, postcolonial, capitalist and socialist regimes of power, and how these pasts shape their present social worlds.

The intersections of anthropology, history and political economy continue to shape her current research. She is engaged in projects on imagining the political and struggles for transformation, affective relations in narrating revolutionary change, irregular migration and the unbound bodies of laboring subjects. At the same time, she examines knowledge production in the social sciences, with particular attention to ethnographic explorations of gender differences in science labs and classrooms, and alternative modalities of producing knowledge beyond the confines of the classroom, the university and conventional ethnographic methodologies.

After six years of holding a joint appointment at the Department of Anthropology and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, Sabea returned to AUC, where she continues her research agenda while integrating it into her teaching and service.

In the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology, she teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; Anthropologies of Africa; Fieldwork Methods; Contemporary Theory in Anthropology; Classic Social Theory; Anthropology and Travel Accounts; Public History and Archiving; and Migrants and Transnationals. At the graduate level, her courses include History and Theory of Anthropology, History and Memory, Time and Temporality, Theorizing the State and Reading Capital.

 

Research Interest
  • Thematic Interests: Political economy (commodities; plantations and labor relations; transnational corporations; socialist polities); legal and political anthropology (nationhood, colonial and post-colonial orders; citizenship); the anthropology of Africa; the anthropology of development (globalization; politics of development); history production and memory; history of anthropology of Africa; gender studies; knowledge production in the social sciences.
  • Regional focus: East and southern Africa; Egypt and north Africa
  • 2025 تعقيب علي الكلمة المفتاحية لياسين الحاج صالح "ما لا يكذب و ما لا يصدق: الأيديولوجيا و ثالوث الاستثناء و المستحيل والفظيع” Arab Council for Social Science, BeirutL Lebanon. Book chapter.
  • 2023  “Flashes of Revolutionary Times: The University as Meshwork of Revolutionary Hope, Despair and Endurance” In Affective Dynamics of Mass Protests. Cilja Harder and Bilgin Ayata
    (eds.). Routledge. Pp. 202-215.
  • 2023 “New Generation of Social Scientists and Knowledge Production: Perspectives and Experiences” Book Chapter in Arab Council for Social Science, Beirut, Lebanon. (in Arabic)
  • 2023 “Landscapes of Power: Sisal Plantations in Deutsch OstAfrika” In Deutsch-koloniale Baukulturen. Eine globale Architekturgeschichte in 100 visuellen Primärquellen. TU München/Architekturgeschichte Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München.
  • 2018 Hoda ElSadda and Hanan Sabea, Eds. Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives. Cairo Papers in Social Science. American University in Cairo. 35/1.
  • 2016-18 Exhibition, Doing Well, Don’t Worry! Short Tales of Women, Work, Mobility in collaboration with Danish Egyptian Dialogue, Women and Memory Forum, and the Women’s Museum in Aarhaus, Denmark. January 2017, Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo and Aswan, Egypt.
  • 2015 Fernanda Beigel and Hanan Sabea, Eds. Academic Dependency and the Professionalization of the South: Perspectives from the Periphery, a Spanish-English Volume published by University of Cuyo (Argentina) and Latin American Council for Social Science (CLACSO).
  • 2014 Still Waiting: Labor, Revolution and the Struggle for Social Justice in Egypt International Journal of Working Class History. 86: 1-5.
  • 2014 I Dreamed of Being a People: Egypt’s Revolution, the People and Critical Imagination in Beyond the Arab Spring: the Political Aesthetics of Global Protest. . Pnina Webner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots (eds). Edinburgh University Press. Pp. 67-92.
  • 2014 Pioneers of Empire? The Making of Sisal Plantations in German East Africa, 1890-1917 In German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian and Oceanic Experiences, Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, Patrice Nganang, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pp. 114-129.
  • 2012 A Time out of Time: Tahrir, The Political and the Imaginary in the Content of the January 25th Revolution in Egypt” Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots Special Forum Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt. Julia Elyachar and Jessica Weniger (eds). 27, 2012.
  • 2012 Hanan Sabea and Mark Westmoreland, Eds. Visual Productions of Knowledge: Toward a Different Middle East. Cairo Papers in Social Science, American University in Cairo Press.
  • 2012 Iman Hamdy, Malak Rouchdy, Reem Saad and Hanan Sabea, Eds. How to Read the Arab World? Alternative Perspectives from the Social Sciences. (Cairo: Al-Ain).
  • 2011 Experimenting with Possibilities: The Visual, the Sensory and the Affective… Global South, 7 (4), October 2011.
  • 2010 Codifying Manamba: History, Knowledge Production, and Sisal Plantation Workers in Tanzania Special Issue: Imperial Plantations Past and Present, Guest Editors: Piya Chatterjee, Monisha Das Gupta and Richard Cullen Rath, Journal of Historical Sociology 23(1): 590-616.
  • 2009 The Limits of Law in the Mandated Territories: Becoming Manamba and the Struggles of Sisal Plantation Workers in Tanganyika African Studies 68(1): 135-161.
  • 2008 Transnational What? Encounters and Reflections on Questions of Methodology Feminist Africa 11: 13-28.
  • 2008  Mastering the Landscape? Sisal Plantations, Land and Labor in Tanga Region, 1893-1980s International Journal of African Historical Studies 41(3): 411-432.
  • 2007 Plantation Labour in Africa In New Encyclopedia of Africa, John Middleton and Joseph Miller (eds.). Gale Thompson.