News

Speech Bubbles: Comics and Political Cartoons in Sisi’s Egypt

  The Century Foundation invited me to contribute a chapter on Egyptian cartoons and comics for Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism. This chapter builds on extensive fieldwork conducted during my two-year ICWA fellowship, offering the most comprehensive study to date of the challenges facing cartoonists in Egypt. I […]

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Jonathan Guyer Selected For Radcliffe Fellowship

      FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 4, 2017   Contact: Karla Strobel Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University karla_strobel@harvard.radcliffe.edu | 617-495-8608 JONATHAN GUYER SELECTED AS 2017–2018 RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE FELLOW   Cambridge, Mass.— Institute of Current World Affairs fellow Jonathan Guyer has been awarded a 2017-18 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study […]

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Nationalism for Kids: How Egyptian Comics Teach Conflict

I presented a version of this paper in February at “Framing War and Conflict in Comics,” the second annual Symposium on Arab Comics at the American University of Beirut.   When General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ran for the Egyptian presidency in the spring of 2014, the children’s magazine Samir published a stoic caricature of him its […]

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The Politics of Art in the Middle East

Creative provocations shaped the 2011 revolutions that rocked the Middle East and North Africa. Six years later, repression and the absence of political freedoms have stunted opportunities for change. Yet, time and again, Arab visual artists and novelists offer the boldest critiques of resurgent autocracy. ICWA Fellow and award-winning journalist Jonathan Guyer has brought together […]

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Vulnerable, Together: the Ocean and the Sailor

On the ocean, the horizon can feel crushingly wide. From the cockpit, we can only react to what the expanse reveals—and what it doesn’t, with frustratingly vague clues. As we sail through the tropics in rainy season—filled with towering thunderclouds and sudden, violent storms at any hour—we find ourselves often peering nervously into the horizon. […]

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Jonathan Guyer on Egyptian Surrealism

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, ICWA fellow Jonathan Guyer has published a review essay on the resurgent interest in Egypt’s little-known Surrealist movement, co-authored with  American University in Cairo Professor Surti Singh. In “The Double Game of Egyptian Surrealism: How to Curate a Revolutionary Movement,”  Guyer and Singh consider the legacy and enduring relevance of […]

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Remembering Alexandria’s Visionary

In my first piece for the New York Times, I write an homage to the great Alexandrian scholar Mostafa el-Abbadi, who passed away in February. Several obituaries of el-Abbadi appeared in Egyptian newspapers, but most merely consisted of his curriculum vitae. No remembrance captured his colorful disposition and feisty erudition, let alone his ambivalent relationship […]

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Jessica Reilly Selected to Present at International Conference

As an ICWA Fellow, Jessica Reilly sailed around Latin America collecting stories and testimony about the effect on climate change. With the knowledge gained from her fellowship, ICWA is thrilled to announce that she has been selected as to present at the Resilience 2017 conference in Stockholm, Sweeden. The Resilience conference is one of the […]

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