Knowledge and its Producers N.A. Mansour

Jasmine Soliman is an archivist. She started her work on the Akkasah Photography Archive (now part of the al Mawrid Center for Arab Art at New York University (NYU)-Abu Dhabi) in 2016. Prior to that, she worked as an archivist at the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, beginning in 2013, and formerly was a business development professional working largely in the Middle East. Her work focuses on collection appraisal and management, cataloging and descriptive vocabularies, website UX/UI design, and social media outreach. She collaborates with the al Mawrid team to oversee the physical and digital collections, and works closely with the NYU Digital Library Technology Services Team and the website teams at NYU Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, as well as with the general public as they use the collections. She has presented her work at MELCOM, UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Sharjah Art Foundation and The British Library. She endeavors to create archives that are inclusive and accessible to all in their design and function, and considerate of socioeconomic status and physical ability.She is the Founder of RepCinema.com which highlights repertory cinema screenings in the UAE and London and highlights of her work can be found at JasmineSoliman.com
Credits:Music: Blue Dot SessionsLogo: Marwa Yasser Gadallah

This episode of Knowledge and its Producers talks to Bharti Lalwani, who is a perfumer and art critic as well as the curator of the online exhibition Bagh-e Hind. Throughout the interview, Lalwani tells us about her journey to making perfume and what it is to work as an independent perfumer, not only demonstrating that practice and expertise are intertwined, but what it is to exist outside of institutional structures. Later in the show, we are joined by her collaborator on Bagh-e Hind, Nicolas Roth, to talk about digital exhibition curation and what it is to tell a multi-faceted history of scent.
Credits:Music: Blue Dot SessionsLogo: Marwa Yasser Gadallah

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley are the authors of the cookbook Falastin. In this episode of Knowledge and its Producers, we think about how food is in itself a way to preserve heritage and document how it changes over time, a stark contrast to academia. Together, we think about how to write about labor, the place of cookbooks in  modern society and what it is to document something like food.

When you think of a researcher, most people think of professors in universities. When you think of academic books, you think of books with chapters. Our guest today, Mohamed ElShahed, disrupts these assumptions and does it with an urban history flair. Mohamed ElShahed is an independent historian and curator and is well known for his website Cairobserver. We’re going to be talking to him about his book today, "Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide" out now from the American University in Cairo Press. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Today we will be talking to the founders and editors of Contingent Magazine, Marc Reyes and Erin Bartram. Contingent aims at making history accessible to all while supporting academics who don’t have job security. I hope you enjoy talking to them as much as I do; there’s a lot of laughter in this interview. Bill Black is also a co-founder of Contingent Magazine, but he wasn’t available for this interview.
Credits:Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions.This episode was audio edited by Sophie Potts

Our guest today is Jean Druel, who is a member of the Dominican Order, a member of the Dominican Order (a part of the Catholic Church) who lives in Cairo. After a Master’s Degree in theology and Coptic patrology, he graduated in Teaching Arabic as Foreign Language at the American University of Cairo. In 2012, he completed a PhD thesis in the history of Arabic grammar at the University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands titled “Numerals in Arabic grammatical theory.” He managed the 200 Project (2013‒2016), which aimed to historically contextualize the works of 200 authors of the Arab Islamic heritage. He served as director of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) in Cairo between 2014 and 2020. He currently studies a manuscript of Sībawayh’s (180/796?) Kitāb that has never been edited.