Knowledge and its Producers

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.

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.

Our guest today is M. Lynx Qualey. We’re going to be talking about everything from translation to KDrama to work-life balance to the idea of guilty pleasures. Qualey is founding editor of the ‘ArabLit’ website (www.arablit.org), which won a 2017 London Book Fair “Literary Translation Initiative” prize. She also publishes the experimental ArabLit Quarterly magazine and is co-host of the Bulaq podcast. Her co-translation of the middle-grade novel Ghady and Rawan was published in August 2019 by University of Texas Press, and her translation Sonia Nimr’s Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands was published in 2020 by Interlink. She writes for a variety of popular publications. We’re going to start by talking about ArabLit Quarterly.

Our guest today on Knowledge and its Producers is Vanessa Taylor. She is the founding editor of the Drinking Gourd magazine, and she edits a newsletter called Nazar, which tackles issues of surveillance and the Muslim community in the United States. She is a writer and journalist, tackling topics such as Black Muslim womanhood, Muslim American politics, Afrofuturism, surveillance, and more. Our interview is going to range from the more abstract to the more concrete, the more personal: what is writing like for Vanessa? How much do institutions matter? What can we do to challenge them? This show is generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

CW: References to the Armenian Genocide

Sato Moughalian is one of those people who can do drastically different things well. She is, to my mind, everything a professional historian should be. Sensitive. Kind. Fearless. Detail-oriented. She’s also a professional flutist and is the artistic director of Perspectives Ensemble, which is a chamber group. She’s invested in documenting her people’s history, musical, material and more. We’ll be talking about, amongst other topics, her recent book, out 2019 from Stanford University Press’ imprint Redwood Press, about her grandfather, the artist, entrepreneur, and ceramicist David Ohannessian, Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian. It was nominated for a Pen/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and was a finalist for the Prose Award in Biography and Autobiography. Feast of Ashes tells the story of David Ohannessian, the renowned ceramicist who in 1919 founded the art of Armenian pottery in Jerusalem, where his work and that of his followers is now celebrated as a local treasure. Ohannessian's life encompassed some of the most tumultuous upheavals of the modern Middle East. Born in an isolated Anatolian mountain village, he witnessed the rise of violent nationalism in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, endured arrest and deportation in the Armenian Genocide, founded a new ceramics tradition in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, and spent his final years, uprooted, in Cairo and Beirut. The book begins and ends with his granddaughrer, Sato Moughalian and her experiences as an artist and as a historian of this important narrative. Moughalian is now working on a second book. 

Welcome to Knowledge and its Producers is a limited series from the Maydan produced by  NA Mansour. In each episode, we’ll be talking to people who are at the forefront of knowledge production, typically away from the traditional educational power structures.

Sato’s Performances

https://youtu.be/DYmM-LE2-OA

https://youtu.be/0llYDha2x2o

https://youtu.be/3mxLlBcaFB8

Sato’s album Oror (With Alyssa Reit)

On Spotify

On YouTube

On Apple Music