"Agriculture, Water, and Senses of Time in Colonial Egypt" presented by Dr. Jennifer Derr, American University in Cairo

A workshop presented by Dr. Jennifer Derr, Assistant Professor, American University in Cairo, and IHS Fellow.

Dr. Jennifer Derr, Modern Egyptian historian and Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo, earned a Master of Arts in Arab Studies, with distinction, at Georgetown University in 2001, and a PhD at Stanford University in 2009. Professor Derr has also spent some 6 years researching and living in Egypt. 

Her dissertation, “The Geography of Authority: Environmental Infrastructure, Cash Crop Agriculture, and Property Relations in Southern Egypt, 1868-1931,” has been described as “both empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated” by Dr. Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History at Stanford.

“My dissertation is at once a critical examination of state authority, as shaped by environmental infrastructure, private business, and competing colonial interests, and a detailed discussion of the trajectory of Upper Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Dr. Derr writes, “As Egyptian history is currently defined as the history of Egypt’s north, my work broadens the analytical lens by exploring the historical experiences of the south and how they were connected to and disassociated from those of northern Egypt.”