Current guest researchers

Noa Jacobs-Latrèche

Noa Jacobs-Latrèche is a PhD candidate in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. Her research examines how practices of friendship in Cairo intersect with spatial, gender and class dynamics. By exploring the ways friendships are embedded in the city’s urban fabric, her work sheds light on how social ties are shaped by public and private spaces, leisure practices, and discourses of intimacy in a context marked by socioeconomic inequality and a complex physical layout. She holds an MA in Middle East Studies and a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Ghent University.

Giulia Proietti

Giulia Proietti is an MA student in Languages and Cultures at the University of Milan. Her research examines how the language of “women’s empowerment” and “gender equality”, as promoted by international organizations, is translated and reinterpreted in the Egyptian context. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and decolonial, Arab, and Islamic feminist perspectives, her work explores translation as a cultural and political practice through which meanings are negotiated and contested. By focusing on feminism as a plural and contested field in which global and locally situated perspectives intersect, her research seeks to explain how language shapes not only how gender issues are understood, but also who is recognized as a legitimate subject.

Beshouy Botros

Beshouy Botros is a PhD candidate working in the History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments at Yale University. Beshouy is writing a dissertation on the histories of science and sexuality across Northern Africa that shaped trans medicine’s emergence in Cairo and Casablanca, where some of the earliest clinics offering gender-affirming surgical procedures emerged. This project dilates on the relationship between colonial modernity and the body while teasing out the conditions of possibility and the historical processes that made of trans medicine in Egypt and the Maghreb. During their time at NVIC, Beshouy will be gathering materials on mediatized cases of transition in the Arabic press and bibliographic sources.

Chada Bachri

Chada Bachri holds a PhD in Education from Gazi University in Turkey. She is currently pursuing a second PhD at the University of Bordeaux, where her research focuses on the geopolitical perspectives of Francophonie in the Middle East as a form of soft power, with a particular emphasis on Egypt. Her work examines French language education as a site of political, cultural, and educational negotiation, drawing on policy analysis, historical sources, and sociological approaches to language and education. By exploring the ways in which education policies are embedded in regional affairs, her research sheds light on how educational reforms are shaped by diplomatic and geopolitical dynamics in a context marked by shifting power relations and transnational influences.