Dean of the College Presents
Faculty Seminar by Professor Omar Cheta
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Hegeman 204A
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Please join us
Omar ChetaAssistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Historical Studies
Title: Tito al-Avvocato: A Microhistory
This talk turns to a moment in the recent past, when European migration flowed to the Arabic-speaking southern shores of the Mediterranean. During the 1800s, Egypt was quickly becoming a central node of global capitalism as a major exporter of cotton, and, later, home to the Suez Canal. It was also the site of the most aggressive centralized state-building project in the Ottoman world. The growing scholarship on modern Egypt teaches us about the trajectories of the entrepreneurs who had access to European capital, the Egyptians who, alongside Italian and Greek workers, fought for communist and anarchist futures, and the intellectuals who developed new discourses in parallel to this rapid societal change. In contrast to the prevailing interest in capturing momentous events and influential historical characters, Professor Cheta explores the trajectory of a single individual who followed a more ‘ordinary’ course that rendered him almost invisible in the historical record: Tito Figari al-avvocato, a second-generation Italian-Egyptian, who practiced law in the decade preceding the professionalization of law in Egypt, and left no record of his life but whose name (and voice) are scattered within multiple Cairene court records throughout the 1860s and 70s. By reconstructing the life of Tito, Professor Cheta shows what is being consistently left out of Egypt’s history in the mid-nineteenth century, namely how individuals responded to and navigated the institutional and intellectual landscapes of modern legal regimes and globalized markets. This microhistory is based on a chapter from Professor Cheta’s current book project, “How Commerce Became Legal: Market Governance in Late Ottoman Egypt.”
Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Faculty Commons Room.
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Hegeman 204A