Celebrating Five Years of Law in the AUC

On October 21st, 2010, in Oriental Hall, at 6:00 p.m. the Department will host an event to celebrate five years since the establishment of the department of law.  The event will be the occasion to launch an annual lecture series called "The Enid Hill Lecture in Law and the Humanities."  Khaled Fahmy, who is currently the Chair of the History Department at the AUC, will give the first lecture. The title of the lecture is:  Siyasa and Shari'a: The politics of implementing Islamic law in Modern Egypt .  Prof. Fahmy has been doing archival research on courts records in 19th century Egypt at the moment of modern codifications.  His scholarship has changed a great deal of our received ideas about the Egyptian legal system in the 19th century and the relationship between Islamic law and modern codifications.  Following the lecture there will be a reception.

 

This series of lectures is named after Professor Emeritus Enid Hill to honor her service to the Department of Law and its two degree programs. During the span of her long career in the AUC, Professor Hill worked with passion and fearless determination to promote a deeper, and sociologically informed understanding of the role of law in post-colonial settings particularly in Egypt.  Since the publication of her book Mahkama! Studies in the Egyptian Legal System: Courts and Crimes, Law and Society in 1979, professor Hill worked tierelessly to create a center of graduate learning in law and society at the AUC.  In 2005 the Law Department was created and Professor Hill became its founding Chair until her retirement in 2008.

Khaled Fahmy

Short bio

 

• Professor and Chair, Department of History, American University in Cairo.
• Education:
• BA, Economic, AUC, 1985
• MA, Political Science, AUC, 1988
• DPhil, Modern History, Oxford, 1993
• His research interests lie within the social and cultural history of modern Egypt, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law, medicine and society in the 19^th century.
• Representative publications:
• Mehmed Ali (Oneworld Publications, October 2008)
• All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1997),
• Modernity and the Body: Essays in the history of law and medicine in modern Egypt (Cairo, 2000; in Arabic)
• “An olfactory tale of two cities: Cairo in the nineteenth century” in Historians in Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon, ed. Jill Edwards. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002, pp. 155-187.
• “For Cavafy with love and squalor: notes on the history and historiography of cosmopolitan Alexandria”, in Michael Silk and A. Hirst, eds. Alexandria: Real and Imagined (London, 2004).
• Currently writing a book on the history of law and medicine in modern Egypt for University of California Press.