Stephen Urgola is AUC’s University archivist, director of AUC records management and interim associate dean of the Rare Books and Special Collections Library. He began his archival career as a work-study student and later earned a master’s degree in history and a certificate in archives from New York University. AUC’s archives have been his home for 25 years. He enjoys street photography and going on walks through historic areas of Cairo.
What drives you?
There's a saying: You die twice. You die when you physically die, and you die the last time your name is uttered. Working in archives and oral history keeps people’s memories alive and prevents that second death. It’s very painful when someone passes away before we’ve had the chance to interview them. That’s a tough part of the job.
What do you find yourself thinking about the most?
I often think about the challenges we face in preserving heritage, from archives to historical buildings, in Egypt and worldwide. Heritage is under financial, environmental and technological pressure. Plus there is so much digital content to deal with and imperfect means of capturing it.
What is the biggest decision you have made?
Coming to Egypt and AUC — it made such a difference in terms of the people I've had the chance to interact with (Cairo is the biggest small town in the world; everybody’s connected), the places I have seen and the historical collections I've worked with. It also led to meeting my wife, Helen Rizzo [associate professor of sociology and director of the Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at AUC]!
What advice would you give your younger self?
I'd tell my college self to spend a year studying abroad — maybe even at AUC.
How do you want to be remembered?
As someone who played a part in preserving and promoting the heritage of places that matter to me: Egypt, Cairo and AUC.
For the first time, AUC’s New Cairo campus hosted Artozium, a three-week public arts festival held in the summer of 2026, featuring free concerts and plays, film screenings, art workshops and exhibitions.
The festival’s name is a portmanteau of “art” and “symposium,” with the “z” emphasizing its focus on developing Gen Z artists and creatives. “We merged the five programs in our department — graphic design, visual arts, film, music and theatre — into one big project,” said Wael El Mahallawy, music professor, chair of the Department of the Arts and general manager of Artozium.
Cairo’s historic art scene is centered downtown, and with more people moving to New Cairo, Artozium aimed to make AUC’s campus a hub for an emerging arts scene east of the Nile, explained El Mahallawy. “Artozium covers not only New Cairo but also the New Capital and Al Shorouk,” he said. “There are very few theaters, exhibition venues or galleries in this area.”
The festival brought together collaborations with cornerstones of Cairo’s art scene, including film shorts shown at the renowned Zawya Cinema, screenings from the Manassat Film Festival, a performance by the Cairo Arab Choir, and performances by the Reda Egyptian Folklore Dance Troupe and the all-women Egyptian drum band Tablet Elsitt.
Attendees also experimented with their creative talents through workshops on ceramics, filmmaking and puppetry, taught by AUC faculty and professionals in the field. Actor Tarek El-Ebiary ’12 presented an interactive standup comedy show, while drummer Mostafa Abbas led a percussion performance.
The festival also showcased visual art through A Title Resembling an Unstable Image, an exhibition curated by artist Ahmed Shawky Hassan that featured emerging artists exploring the city as a living structure.
Artozium turned the spotlight on AUC’s own artistic community too. Mashrou’ 26 showcased the creativity of the University’s 12th and largest graduating class in graphic design. Alumni performed in Gat Salima and El Masyada, while undergraduate students featured in Hekaya Bel Maqloub play. The Theatre Association performed Neseet El Cheque, and student organizations Musicana and the AUC Egyptian Folklore Troupe brought music and traditional dances to the festival, further showcasing the breadth of the University’s artistic community.
For much of the 20th century, Egyptology was a field overwhelmingly shaped by scholars from outside Egypt. Titans such as Howard Carter dominated the landscape, while Egyptian researchers, excavators and curators rarely led their own expeditions, buried under the systematic barriers to enter the field. Selim Bey Hassan, scholar and excavator of the Giza Plateau, stood as the equal of the European and North American archaeologists of his time. His archives, which have been part of AUC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL) since 1980, reveal the impact of an Egyptian scholar who documented and interpreted Egypt's ancient past.
“The archive gives us a vivid picture of Selim Bey Hassan in the field,” shared Amr Omar, assistant director for Middle East and Egyptology Collections at RBSCL. “The photos and personal notes reveal the excavation as it actually unfolded: the daily decisions, the unexpected discoveries and the practical challenges of working on one of the most famous and closely watched archaeological sites on Earth.”
“Hassan’s national significance is clear. He is a public embodiment of the possibility that Egyptians could excavate their own ancient past with scholarly competence and institutional authority.”
Hassan’s excavations, which took place between 1929 and 1939 for Cairo University, uncovered the Old Kingdom tombs on the Giza Plateau in remarkable detail. Buried under centuries of sand, these tombs reveal the final resting places of royal family members, high-court officials and elites who formed Egypt’s complex social fabric 4,000 years ago.
In the 1920s, Egypt was becoming the center of an emerging field of Egyptology largely dominated by foreigners. Western archaeologists flooded the Valley of the Kings, seeking discoveries that would bring fame, prestige and wealth. While many Egyptian scholars, workers, inspectors and intellectuals were certainly present in archaeology, often indispensably, their work received little recognition, Omar noted. Foreign institutions controlled much of the training and publication process, leaving the Egyptians facing an uphill battle, he said.
The greatest splash came in 1922, when Howard Carter found the lost Tomb of King Tutankhamun. The discovery became the biggest archaeological revelation on Egyptian soil in the modern age, shadowed by the fact that it was achieved by a foreigner and interpreted by a body of scholars outside of Egypt.
Instead of one grand discovery — the gold, carriages and gilded sarcophagus famously associated with Carter — Hassan worked slowly and methodically at the Giza Plateau and established a new Egyptian-led path in archaeology. Inscriptions were documented, reliefs were photographed and research was published in volumes that contributed to international Egyptology scholarship. Hassan’s success showed that Egyptians not only had the ability but the right to excavate, understand and interpret their own history. He emerged as an Egyptologist, not assisting a foreign expedition, but leading one for his own people.
“If Carter’s candle illuminated the treasures of Tutankhamun, Hassan’s archive illuminates something no less consequential: the process by which Egyptians began to claim the authority to excavate, document and interpret their ancient past on their own terms,” Omar said. “That is not a minor chapter in the history of Egyptian archaeology. It is an epic story.”
AUC hosts Hassan’s collection, including
10 volumes covering his excavations in Giza and his 16-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt in Arabic. Lecture notes, drafts of official reports, Giza and Saqqara excavation records, and countless photographs fill the archive. His personal library was also gifted to the University: 2,500 volumes and journals in German, English, French, Arabic and Japanese. It was the first Egyptology collection the library ever received, marking the beginning of AUC’s now extensive cache.
“A thorough reading of Selim Bey’s archives reveals far more than the papers of an individual scholar,” Omar explained. “It shows how his knowledge was formed, how his excavations were organized, how his publications were produced and how his career intersected with one of the decisive moments in the long history of Egyptian Egyptology.”
Pouring over the collection, scholars encounter time-worn pages covered in Hassan’s handwriting, sepia portraits of his team and photographs of the vast Giza complex. The collection has been used by researchers at AUC as well as universities around the world interested in Hassan’s prolific impact. As the Giza Plateau continues to change, these nearly century-old documents connect the past with the present.
“Hassan’s national significance is clear,” Omar affirmed. “He is a public embodiment of the possibility that Egyptians could excavate their own ancient past with scholarly competence and institutional authority. He did not merely stand beside Carter as a parallel figure. He changed the terms of comparison by showing that Egyptian archaeology did not need a heroic discoverer. It needed institutions, records, publications and authority. He made Egyptian-led archaeology visible as a serious, disciplined and internationally legible enterprise.”
