Nancy Reynolds

​Associate Professor of History, of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (Affiliate), and of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies (Affiliate)
PhD, Stanford University
MA, Stanford University
BA, Harvard University
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    Professor Reynolds is an environmental and social-cultural historian of twentieth-century Egypt.

    Her research documents the construction and destruction of built environments to investigate the intersection of politics and material objects from the mundane to the monumental: socks, shoes, store floors, urban streets, granite hills, dams, ancient temples, and mud-brick roofs. Reynolds’s research on Egypt’s department stores resulted in her first book, “A City Consumed,” which won the Roger Owen Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and several articles on the history of salesclerks. “A City Consumed” investigated how the nationalist movement targeted consumer goods and commercial spaces as part of its effort to release Egypt from “colonial captivity.” Offering a new social history of the 1952 Cairo Fire, the book attends closely to popular struggles over dress and patterns of consumption and contributes to recent revisions of the nature of “cosmopolitanism” in late colonial Egypt. Her research on urban fire and training on a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (“Heat: Recent Egyptian Histories”; 2014) turned her to study the environment of mid-century Egypt: the building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the history of desert botanical research, and the mudbrick structures of Egypt’s sustainable architect Hassan Fathy. Since 2014 she has collaborated with Dr. Anne-Marie McManus, a comparative literature scholar now at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin), on spaces deemed political, environmental, and social “wastelands” in the Middle East and North Africa. Their Mellon Sawyer Seminar’s final symposium, “Following Absence” led to a special section of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (44.2; August 2024).

    Professor Reynolds teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern Middle Eastern history, urban studies, gender history, and environmental history. She has been active in humanities doctoral program strategic planning at Washington University in St. Louis, where she has administered both graduate PhD and MA programs in History and in JIMES.

    She currently serves on the Arts of Africa advisory board for the Art Institute of Chicago.

     

    Selected Publications

    Books

    A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt. Stanford University Press, 2012. (Winner of the 2013 Roger Owen Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association)

    Articles and Book Chapters

    “Following Absence: Plot Lines of Erasure and Ruination in the Middle East and North Africa: An Introduction,” co-authored with Anne-Marie McManus, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) 44.2 (August 2024): 277-286.

    “Vanishing Nubia: Following Botanists in Egypt,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) 44.2 (August 2024): 327-341; for special section, Following Absence.

    “Retro-Rivering: A roundtable review of Faisal H. Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire,” H-Net Environment Roundtable Vol. 14, no. 6 (June 2024): 12-19

    “‘Architectural Design for Procuring Thermal Comfort’: Hassan Fathy, Nubia, and Desert Building,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Special Issue: ‘Climate Change and the Built Environment in the Islamic World’, 13:2 (May 2024), pp. 361–91

    "Dams, Ditches, and Drains: Managing Egypt’s Modern Hydroscape,” chapter for Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History, edited by Beth Baron and Jeff Culang. Pp. 196-216 (Oxford University Press, 2024)

    “City of the High Dam: Aswan and the Promise of Postcolonialism in Egypt,” City & Society, vol. 29, no. 1 (April 2017): 213-235.

    “States of Law and Sexuality in the Middle East,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 27, no. 2 (summer 2015): 182-193.

    “Beyond the Urban,” a contribution to the “Public Space Roundtable,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 46, no.1 (February 2014): 172-174. 

    “Building the Past: Rockscapes and the Aswan High Dam in Egypt,” in Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Alan Mikhail. Pp. 181-205 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

    "Entangled Communities: Interethnic Relationships among Urban Salesclerks and Domestic Workers in Egypt, 1927-1961,” The European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire, vol. 19, no. 1, 113-139.

    “Salesclerks, Sexual Danger, and National Identity in Egypt in the 1920s and 1940s,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 63-88.

    “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman’: Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930-1956,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43, no. 1 (February 2011): 49-74

    “Sharikat al-Bayt al-Misri: Domesticating Commerce in Egypt, 1931-1956,” Arab Studies Journal, vol. 7.2/8.1 (Fall 1999/Spring 2000): 75-107.

    “Economics: Advertising and Marketing: Egypt,” entry for Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Volume 4, Suad Joseph et al (eds.), Leiden: Brill, 2006, 118-120

    Awards

    The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, January to December 2012, For the project “The Politics of Environment, Culture, and National Development in the Building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, 1956-1971”

    Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History, 2010, The American Historical Association

    Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University.

    Social Science Research Council Dissertation Research Fellowship for the Social Sciences and Humanities.

    Grants

    Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2016-18. For the project: “Grounding the Ecocritical: Materializing Wastelands and Living on in the Middle East”; with Dr. Anne-Marie McManus.

    Arts and Sciences Summer 2016 Collaborative Seed Grant, Washington University, 2016.
    For the project: “Wasteland Literacies”; with Dr. Anne-Marie McManus.

    Mellon New Directions Fellowship, 2014-2016; deferred to begin in 2017.
    For the project, “Heat: Recent Egyptian Histories.”

    Faculty Seminar Grant, Center for the Humanities, Washington University, 2014-2017.
    For “Wastelands,” co-convened with Dr. Anne-Marie McManus.

    Recent Courses

    Middle East in the Twentieth Century

    Colonial Cities and the Making of Modernity

    History of the Late Ottoman Middle East

    Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

    Graduate Core Seminar: Social and Cultural History of the Modern Middle East

    Beyond the Harem: Women, Gender, and Revolution in the Modern Middle East

    Egypt and the Arab Spring: Middle Eastern Revolution in Historical Perspective (Advanced Seminar)

    The Literature of History

    Law and Revolution in Modern Egypt: A Methods Seminar

    Between Sand and Sea: History, Environment, and Politics in the Arabian Peninsula

    Research Seminar for M.A. Students in Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies

    Shopping and Consumption: Historical Approaches

    Hold That Thought Podcast

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    Washington People: Nancy Reynolds and Anne-Marie McManus

    Washington People: Nancy Reynolds and Anne-Marie McManus

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    Middle East

    International Urban History

    International Urban History

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    A City Consumed

    A City Consumed

    By Nancy Reynolds

    Though now remembered as an act of anti-colonial protest leading to the Egyptian military coup of 1952, the Cairo Fire that burned through downtown stores and businesses appeared to many at the time as an act of urban self-destruction and national suicide. The logic behind this latter view has now been largely lost. Offering a revised history, Nancy Reynolds looks to the decades leading up to the fire to show that the lines between foreign and native in city space and commercial merchandise were never so starkly drawn.