Join us for Booktalk Episode 8, Dr Carl Rommel (University of Helsinki) in conversation about his new book Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics, published by University of Texas Press in July 2021. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion.

The book is available for purchase for customers in Europe and the Middle East from https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781477323175/egypts-football-revolution/, quote CSFS2021 at check-out for 30% discount; and for customers in the US, https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/rommel-egypts-football-revolution, quote UTROMEGY at check-out for 20% discount.

This video is also available with accessibility features as a podcast at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre-booktalk

Extract from publisher’s website: Both a symbol of the Mubarak government’s power and a component in its construction of national identity, football served as fertile ground for Egyptians to confront the regime’s overthrow during the 2011 revolution. With the help of the state, appreciation for football in Egypt peaked in the late 2000s. Yet after Mubarak fell, fans questioned their previous support, calling for a reformed football for a new, post revolutionary nation.
In Egypt’s Football Revolution, Carl Rommel examines the politics of football as a space for ordinary Egyptians and state forces to negotiate a masculine Egyptian chauvinism. Basing his discussion on several years of fieldwork with fans, players, journalists, and coaches, he investigates the increasing attention paid to football during the Mubarak era; its demise with the 2011 uprisings and 2012 Port Said massacre, which left seventy-two fans dead; and its recent rehabilitation. Cairo’s highly organized and dedicated Ultras fans became a key revolutionary force through their anti regime activism, challenging earlier styles of fandom and making visible entrenched ties between sport and politics. As the appeal of football burst, alternative conceptions of masculinity, emotion, and politics came to the fore to demand or prevent revolution and reform.

Dr Carl Rommel is a social anthropologist, who earned his PhD from SOAS, University of London (2015). His doctoral research explored the emotional politics of Egyptian football before and after the January 2011 Revolution. Currently, Dr Rommel is a postdoctoral research affiliate in the ERC-funded Crosslocations project at the University of Helsinki. He also teaches anthropology at Stockholm University. His ongoing field research in Cairo interrogates intersections between precarity, masculinity, temporality and urban space in, around and through a variety of large and small ‘projects’ (mashari‘). Dr Rommel’s research has been published in Critical African Studies, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, and Men and Masculinities.
Other key article publications by Carl Rommel are:
•	Rommel, Carl (2018) “Men in time: On masculine productivity, corruption and youth football in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution” Men and Masculinities, 21(3), 341-362, DOI: 10.1177/1097184X17748173.
•	Rommel, Carl (2016) “Troublesome Thugs or Respectable Rebels: Class, martyrdom and Cairo’s revolutionary Ultras” Middle East – Topics & Arguments, 6, 33-42, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.17192/meta.2016.6.3788.
•	Rommel, Carl (2014) “A Veritable Game of the Nation: On the changing status of football within the Egyptian national formation in the wake of the 2009 World Cup qualifiers against Algeria” Critical African Studies, 6(2-3), 157-175, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2014.936079.
•	Rommel, Carl (2011) “Playing with difference: Football as a performative space for division among Suryoye migrants in Sweden” Soccer & Society, 12(6), 850-864, DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2011.609684.

OxfordMEC Booktalk8 - Dr Carl Rommel (University of Helskinki)- Egypts Football Revolution

Speaker: Professor Robert Springborg (Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome)
Recorded on: Friday, 3 November 2017
Edited by: Anne Kimunguyi
First published: 16 November 2017

About the speaker:
Robert Springborg is a non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2002 until 2008, he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair, he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at King’s College, London; University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; and the University of Sydney. In 2016, he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, and Harvard University. 

His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order; Family Power and Politics in Egypt; Legislative Politics in the Arab World (co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq; Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003. His new book -‘Egypt’ has just been published in October 2017 by Polity Press.

MEC Seminar: Governing Divided Egypt

Speaker:Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Chair: Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Joint event with The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA)

About the seminar:

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History and served as the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Study at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society and culture. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach that informs both her teaching and writing, her work explores collective memory and identity, national myths, the transformation of traditions, war and trauma, and cultural perceptions of space, drawing on historical sources, Hebrew literature, educational materials, popular and folkloric forms, as well as in-depth interviews. Her work addresses the impact of nationalism, secularisation, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Yael Zerubavel is the author of the award-winning book, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2019), and is currently working on another book manuscript entitled Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.

Recorded on: 10 May 2019
First Published: 3 June 2019
Edited by: Kaja Wawrzak(MEC)

Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture

St Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a world-renowned centre for research and teaching in global and regional issues. The College provides an interdisciplinary environment to study a range of subjects from development to international relations. St Antony's houses seven research centres focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia as well as programmes on North America, Burma, Morocco, Sudan and Taiwan. In our regional centres and programmes we use insights and methods from both social sciences and the humanities to deepen our understanding of the key parts of the world. The work done here helps to inform public debate and public policy.

Our Fellows, students and visiting researchers include leading experts on the regions of the world and on issues of global and transnational importance. Each year we host visiting experts from the world’s leading universities and think tanks and from such fields as diplomacy, journalism, business, and politics. Our select group of more than 450 graduate students are among the best and the brightest, representing all the continents.

OxfordMEC Booktalk8 - Dr Carl Rommel (University of Helskinki)- Egypts Football Revolution

St Antony's College, Oxford

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