Department of History > Faculty and Staff > Faculty > Faculty (by name) > Sedra, Paul
paul_sedra

Paul Sedra

Associate Professor
Office: AQ 6226
Telephone: 778-782-7626
Email: pdsedra@sfu.ca
Personal website: paulsedra.com
Twitter handle: @sedgate
Blog: thawrathoughts.blogspot.com

Areas of Study: Middle East, Africa and Asia, Global/Comparative

Biography

I was born and raised in Toronto by a couple of academics, and spent much of my childhood in the vicinity of the University of Toronto. After graduating from the high school attached to the U of T’s education faculty, I headed south of the border for my undergraduate work, and began the long, arduous process of learning Arabic at Princeton University. In my senior year at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, my thesis project involved a summer of interviews with Egyptian public figures on Coptic-Muslim relations. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in international affairs at Princeton, I was awarded the Commonwealth Scholarship for study towards a Master's degree at Oxford University. A chance discovery at the Church Missionary Society archives in Birmingham prompted a shift of focus from Egyptian politics to Egyptian history, and my master's thesis would address the activities of nineteenth-century Anglican missionaries in Cairo. I was enticed back to the United States by New York University's pioneering joint program in History and Middle Eastern studies, developed by Michael Gilsenan and Zachary Lockman. NYU's MacCracken Fellowship permitted two years of fieldwork in Cairo and London, after which I ended up once again in Toronto, writing up the doctoral dissertation and teaching at U of T. I defended the dissertation in late 2005, by which point I had taken up an Assistant Professorship in History at Dalhousie University. In 2006, I made the move from coast to coast, and assumed my current post at SFU.

Research Interests

The principal focus of my research is the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. Most recently, I have examined the connections between education and the rise of the modern state in nineteenth-century Egypt. To this end, my work has chronicled moments of contestation as to both the methods and the purposes of education — contestation between Anglican and Presbyterian missionaries, Ottoman and Egyptian officials, Coptic priests and Muslim reformers.
In a different vein, given a longstanding interest in the popular culture of the Nasser era, I am undertaking both teaching and research in the history of Egyptian cinema; specifically, the film culture of the 1950s and 1960s. I am particularly interested in exploring the images of village poverty, colonial violence, family discord, and the subjugation of women that pervade such films. My current research considers the possible links between these images and such state priorities as eradicating 'backwardness' and 'superstition,' pacifying the 'social body,' and consolidating 'modern' forms of subjectivity among them, the companionate spouse, the productive worker, and the patriotic citizen.

Publications (Books)

sedra_mission_to_modernity

From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011.)

Publications (Articles)

  • “Exposure to the Eyes of God: Monitorial Schools and Evangelicals in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, first published on 06 May 2010 (iFirst), 1-19.
  • “Writing the History of the Modern Copts: From Victims and Symbols to Actors,” History Compass 7, 3 (2009), 1049-1063.
  • “John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts,” Journal of Religious History 28, 3 (October 2004), 219-239.
  • “Imagining an Imperial Race: Egyptology in the Service of Empire,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 24, 1 (2004), 249-259.
  • “Class Cleavages and Ethnic Conflict: Coptic Christian Communities in Modern Egyptian Politics,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 10, 2 (July 1999), 219-235.

Publications (Chapters)

  • “The Patriarch and His Project: Cultivating a Coptic Community in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Ramez Boutros, ed. Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 1 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 109-120.
  • “Missionaries, Peasants, and the Protection Problem: Negotiating Coptic Reform in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, eds. US-Middle East Historical Encounters (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007).
  • “Schooling for a Modern Coptic Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Egypt,” in Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, eds. North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 196-213.
  • “The Journals of an Ottoman Student in England, July 1829 to January 1830,” in Camron Michael Amin, Benjamin C. Fortna, and Elizabeth Frierson, eds. The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook for History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 401-405.
  • “Observing Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha and His Administration at Work, 1843-1846,” in Camron Michael Amin, Benjamin C. Fortna, and Elizabeth Frierson, eds. The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook for History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 39-42.
  • “Modernity’s Mission: Evangelical Efforts to Discipline the Nineteenth-Century Coptic Community,” in Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon, eds. Altruism and Imperialism: The Western Religious and Cultural Missionary Enterprise in the Middle East, Middle East Institute Occasional Papers 4 (New York, New York: Columbia University Middle East Institute, 2002), 208-235.
  • “Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut,” in Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, eds. The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, YCIAS Working Paper Series Vol. V (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2002), 290-314.

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