The Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship Advisory Panel welcomes applications for the 2025 Mohamed Ali Foundation fellowships, the residencies for which will run from 28 April-27 June 2025.
The Mohamed Ali Foundation is a UK charity whose aims include advancing the education of the public in the history of the Islamic World, of Egypt and of the Mohamed Ali Family in particular, especially the period of reign of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (1892-1914).
In 2018 the Mohamed Ali Foundation announced the launch of this Fellowship Programme, and which is established to devote scholarly attention to the Abbas Hilmi II Papers held at Durham University and to make the collection’s strengths more widely known to scholars. It is hoped that the fellows’ work will foster deeper understanding of an important period of Egyptian history, and of a transformative era in East -West relations.
The fellowship programme is based at Durham University and managed by an international Advisory Panel comprising academic subject specialists. The programme began in 2019 with the residency of the first fellow Dr Pascale Ghazaleh of the American University in Cairo: her inaugural lecture and the lectures of subsequent fellows are now available online. More fellowships will be awarded over the next years. An Advisory Panel, chaired by Professor Anoush Ehteshami of the Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies will appoint one or two fellows each year.
Fellows will be early career (post-doctoral) or established scholars. The nature of the collection will often require good reading knowledge of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and English. The online catalogue of the collection indicates the languages of each file of material.
Fellows will research the Abbas Hilmi II Papers, on an agreed topic, and deliver a lecture at Durham University. Each lecture will ultimately form a chapter in a volume of high quality and original research to be edited by Dr Ghazaleh. In the interim the lectures will be published in the university’s Middle East Papers series. The breadth of material in the Abbas Hilmi II Papers will reward an interdisciplinary approach. In order to guide candidate fellows an outline plan of this volume, indicating the research strengths of the collection, is provided in the fellowship application documentation (below). This is not intended to be prescriptive and the Advisory Panel will consider alternative suggestions so long as they are well-grounded in the Abbas Hilmi II Papers and this is evidenced in the application proposal.
The Fellowship, tenable jointly in IMEIS and Grey College, entitles the holder to full access during their residency to departmental and other University facilities such as Computing and Information Services and the University Library. Accommodation is provided at Durham during the Easter term (28 April-27 June 2025), but there is flexibility to arrange residencies in different terms to suit fellows’ availability, and fellows may be permitted to reside in Cairo or Istanbul for the duration of the fellowship and using the digitised collection which is freely accessible online. All fellows will visit Durham, if only briefly, in order to deliver their lecture in June. Lectures and other activities elsewhere during the fellowship will be encouraged.
Fellows who do reside at Durham will also be encouraged to take a full part in academic and collegiate life, delivering the already mentioned lecture and perhaps also contributing to seminars.
Fellows will be awarded an honorarium upon completion of their fellowship, and accommodation and all meals will be provided for the duration of the fellowship; a research travel grant is also available to each fellow.
Applicants are advised to familiarise themselves with the online catalogue of the Abbas Hilmi II Papers, or the collection itself, and to review the outline plan of the edited volume (below).
This call is now open, and applications should be submitted by Tuesday 1 October 2024, preferably by email, to the Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship Programme at the address provided.
Applications should include:
• a CV (of no more than two pages);
• a two to three-page outline of the proposed research;
• contact details for two referees.
Please send this information to:
The Secretary
The Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship Programme
Durham University Library
Palace Green
Durham DH1 3RN
United Kingdom
Email: maf.fellow@durham.ac.uk
The 2024 Mohamed Ali Foundation fellows, Prof. Lucia Carminati and Dr Xiaoyue Li, delivered their public lectures at Durham University on 20 June. These lectures will be published in the Middle East Papers series in the autumn, Prof. Carminati's lecture was entitled "No Man’s Land: bureaucrats, Bedouins, and an elusive Egyptian-Ottoman frontier". Dr Li's lecture was entitled "The Khedival Mariut Railway: opportunities and challenges". Past fellows' papers may be viewed online here.
This collection has been digitised. Digital images are linked from each file in the online catalogue.
If you would like to purchase digital copies of specific items from any of our collections, please use our online enquiry form.
If you are a member of teaching staff at Durham University and would like to use material from Archives and Special Collections within your lectures or seminars, we may be able to scan or photograph items for this purpose. Please contact us as early as possible with any teaching digitisation requests.
See also our guide to Digitised Collections Online for further information on our digital resources.
The collections mentioned above are located at Palace Green Library. Our current opening hours are as follows, by appointment only (see below).
See separate Libraries and Site Information guide for further information on Palace Green Library, and for disruption due to roofing works during 2024-2025, visit our guide.
Appointments are required for all visits, please use the enquiry form to book. Appointments need to be made at least three working days in advance, and we will need to know the full list of document references or shelfmarks of the items you wish to consult before we can confirm your booking. If you are unsure of how to do this or need assistance please contact us and we will be happy to help.
