Dr. Lucie Ryzova, DPhil.

RESEARCH INTEREST 

• Social and cultural history of modern Egypt
• Histories of photography
• Visual history, popular culture, vernacular modernity
• History and ethnography of reading and writing; print cultures  

EDUCATION 

• Ph.D. (DPhil): University of Oxford, Faculty of Modern History 
• 2001–2002. MSt in Historical Research, U of Oxford, Faculty of Modern History.
• BA&MA (Magisterius): Charles University in Prague, Department of Near Eastern and African Studies

ACADEMIC CAREER 

• 2025-present. Research Fellow, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences 
• 2014-2025. Associate Professor in Modern Middle East History, University of Birmingham, U.K. (2014-17 Assistant Professor).
• 2011-2013. Leverhulme-John Fell Early Career Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Oxford.
• 2005-2010. Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, University of Oxford.

GRANTS, AWARDS AND PRIZES (SELECTED)

• 2025-28. GACR (Grant Agency of the Czech Republic), Standard Project grant.
• 2022-24. British Academy Small Research Grant
• Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.
• Founder’s Award for Outstanding Early Career Academic, University of Birmingham, U.K.
• Gladstone Prize for first book in non-British History, Royal Historical Society.

MEMBERSHIPS

• Past & Present journal, editorial board member
• Royal Historical Society, Fellow
• Egypte/Sudan/Monde Arabe (ESMA), editorial board member

PUBLICATIONS

Monographs

• 2014. The Age of the Efendiyya : Passages to Modernity in Colonial-National Egypt. Oxford : Oxford University Press  Winner (joint) of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize.
• 2004. La effendiyya ou la modernité contestée. Cairo: CEDEJ (Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales).

Edited Volumes

• Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East, double special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 8., No.2-3. Sole editor.

 Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• 2026 (forthcoming). “Camera Time: Photography and Modern Selfhood in Colonial Egypt and Beyond,” American Historical Review.
• 2026 (forthcoming). “Portrait of the Martyr as a Young Man: Social Lives of Photographs in Revolutionary Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History.
• “Print Culture and New Fictional Imagination in Modern Egypt,” in Stephanie Newell and Karin Barber (eds), Print Cultures and African Literature 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press).
• “Photography, Selfhood, and Cultural Modernity in Egypt” Oxford Handbook of Modern Egypt, edited by Beth Baron and Jeffrey Culang (Oxford University Press).
• “The Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street: The Poetics and Politics of Urban Violence in Revolutionary Time” Past & Present 247 (1), 273-317.
• “Strolling in Enemy Territory: Downtown Cairo, Its Publics, and Urban Heterotopias” Orient-Institut Studies, Orient-Institut Beirut. Translated into Arabic by Medina magazine online (2018).
• “Boys, Girls and Kodaks: Peer Albums and Middle-Class Personhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Egypt” in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 8., No.2-3.
• “Unstable Icons, Contested Histories: Vintage Photographs and Neoliberal Memory in Contemporary Egypt,” in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 8., No.1.
• “Nostalgia for the Modern: Archive Fever in Egypt in the Age of Post-Photography,” in Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation, edited by Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena (De Gruyter, Berlin-Munich 2014).
• “I have the Picture! On the constitution of photographic heritage in the Middle East and its discontents,” in Anthony Downey (ed.), Dissonant Archives: New Media and Contemporary Art Practice in North Africa and the Middle East (Vol. II), I.B.Tauris/Ibraaz.
• “Mourning the Archive in Cairo: Middle Eastern Photographic Heritage between Neoliberalism and Digital Reproduction,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (4).
• “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Collector, Dealer and Academic in the Informal Used-paper Markets of Cairo” in Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World, edited by Sonia Mejcher-Atassi and John-Pedro Schwartz (London: Ashgate).
• “My notepad is my Friend: Efendis and the Act of Writing in Modern Egypt,” in The Maghreb Review, Spring 2008
• “I am a Whore but I will be a Good Mother: On the Production and Consumption of the Female Body in Modern Egypt,” in Arab Studies Journal, Vol. XII no. 2/Vol. XIII no. 1, Fall 2004/Spring 2005. Translated into Arabic by Muhammad Mitwalli and Shirin Abu al-Naga’, Al-Kitaba al-Ukhra, Cairo 2010.            
• “Egyptianising Modernity. Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Classes in Egypt under the Monarchy,” in Re-envisioning Egypt 1919-1952, edited by Arthur Goldschmidt and Amy Johnson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press).

INVITED PRESENTATIONS / ZVANÉ PŘEDNÁŠKY - VÝBĚR

• June 2025. “Hail the Barberians! Reading photographs through a Barberian Lens,” Conventions of Creativity: Everyday Artistry in Africa. Conference in honour of Professor Dame Karen Barber, University of Birmingham, U.K.
• May 2025. “Camera Time: Photography and History in Late Colonial Egypt and Beyond,” CEDEJ, Cairo.
• November 2024. “Vision, Visibilite et mediation en Egypte coloniale” Seminaire Experience des Images, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, (INHA), Paris.
• April 2024. “Sites of Enchantment: Photographic Encounters in Late Colonial Egypt and Beyond” Photo Studios in Focus workshop, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
• November 2022. “Print Cultures and African Literatures” workshop, Council on African Studies, Yale University.
• May 2021. “Disenchanted Eye” CUNY Graduate School, “Dissections” seminar series (online).
• May 2021. “Camera Time: Popular Photography and Local Modernity in Egypt,” American University in Cairo lecture series “Decolonizing the Lens,” online.
• January 2021. “Free Floating Words and Lonely Young Men,” workshop on “Print in Comparative Colonial Perspective,” University of Edinburg, online.