Current guest researchers

Marina de Regt

Marina de Regt is Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has done extensive research in Yemen, Ethiopia and Jordan, focusing on issues related to gender, migration and development. Her most recent research focuses on Yemenis of mixed descent, so-called muwalladeen, and their shifting identities in the diaspora. Marina has published extensively via academic and non-academic channels, and tries to disseminate her research findings also via documentaries, blogs, podcasts and other media.
During her research stay at NVIC, Marina is finalizing a number of publications and doing preliminary research among Yemeni migrants and refugees in Cairo, with special attention for muwalladeen.

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.

Christina de Korte

Christina de Korte is a visual artist and a student in the research master’s program in Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the HKU University of Arts Utrecht and a bachelor’s degree in Language and Culture Studies from Utrecht University. Her master’s thesis research “Let the Textile Speak: Egyptian Khayamiya Through the Streets of Cairo” focuses on the Egyptian appliqué technique khayamiya—derived from the Arabic word for tent, namely khayma—and its contemporary usages before and during Ramadan. By following the routes of various types of khayamiya through Cairo’s streets and taking courses in the Street of the Tentmakers, she analyses how khayamiya dresses up the city, and invites people to interact with it. This interdisciplinary approach between textiles, heritage, material religion, and (art-)history makes it possible to let the textile speak.

Lilly Massoud-Judge

Lilly Massoud-Judge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative political economy and Middle East politics. Her dissertation considers how ongoing economic reforms have impacted material and affective investment in the Egyptian national economy, amid a backdrop of ongoing financialization and integration into regional and international circuits of capital.