Gilles Aubry in conversation with Alia Mossalam The high dam of Aswan in Egypt was built from 1960 to 1964. Thousands of Nubian people were displaced in the flooding operation and relocated to other places in Egypt or Sudan. Alia Mossalam offers comments about Nubian songs that relate to this history, between propaganda, nostalgia, guilt, and anger. Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. For her PhD she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. Some of her research-based articles, essays and short-stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, the Freie Universität in Berlin, and continuing to teach at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts. In 2024, she works at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as a research associate within the project SONIC RESOCIALIZATION and remains an associated EUME Fellow in 2024-25.
