Throughout his multi-disciplinary, international career, Mohamed Elshahed has found that the most apt description of his work is storytelling. In this episode, he guides us through Cairo, London, Mexico City, and Paris, intertwining histories and personal anecdotes to provide context for the book project he's currently undertaking as an Institute Fellow.

Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture. In 2011 he founded Cairobserver, a fluid project with six printed magazines distributed for free to stimulate public debates around issues of architecture, heritage, and urbanism. He is the curator of the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project and of Modernist Indignation, Egypt’s winning pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. As a 2023-2024 Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he has worked on a book about this project, envisioned as a companion to his previous book, Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020).

Learn more about Mohamed’s work: https://mohamed-elshahed.com/

Read about Cairobserver online: https://cairobserver.com/

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Host: Marie Doezema

Production: Marie Doezema and Charlotte Force

Editing: Chris Knapp

Music: Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne performed by Magdalena Baczewska and Sasha He

With thanks to the Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Centre in Paris

The Columbia Global Paris Center is part of a network of 11 global centers of Columbia University in the City of New York, one of the world's leading academic institutions. The centers serve as knowledge hubs that aim to educate and inspire through research, dialogue, and action. They advance understanding, facilitate partnerships, and build the bridges necessary to tackle our changing world.

Columbia Global brings together major global initiatives from across the university to advance knowledge and foster global engagement. Those initiatives include the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

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