Antoinette Ferrand - The Nasserist "Middle Class" in the Age of Development

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 10 September 2026 at 6:00 pm.

This lecture will be devoted to the presentation of Antoinette Ferrand’s book, L’Égypte de Nasser: classes moyennes et idéal socialiste (1952-1970), to be published by Presses universitaires de France, on 24 September 2026. Drawn from the author’s doctoral thesis, which she prepared and defended at Sorbonne University in 2024, this research was awarded the Thesis Prize in Social History from the Foundation Mattei Dogan and the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. An English translation is currently being prepared for AUC Press.

In Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, long an emblem of the non-aligned Arab Third World, the “middle class” was not a social fact but a political construction. Tracing the history of this concept through the 1950s and 1960s, this book uncovers the uses, shifts in meaning and symbolic struggles that shaped it. Mobilised at first as a narrative tool in the service of nationalism, the “middle class” gradually became a statistical and sociological indicator, central to the development project pursued by the Nasserist state. Through a study of the categories produced in Arabic, Antoinette Ferrand strips a term often treated as universal of its false neutrality, restoring its historical depth.

This is a social history rooted in Middle Eastern archives — one that reassesses the contemporary dynamics of the Arab world today, and especially its recent development history.

About the Speaker

Antoinette Ferrand is a research fellow at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (Ifao) in Cairo. In addition to L’Égypte de Nasser, she is also the author of La diaspora syriaque-orthodoxe de Jérusalem (1831-1948), published at Geuthner Editions in 2021.

Her current postdoctoral project focuses on the technical cooperation between Egypt and India (1930s-1960s), and Egypt and other Arab countries (1950s-1970s), offering another perspective on non-alignment and Cold War history (see details). Contact: mail@aferrand.fr

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity.