This graduate student is available to deliver lectures to your K-12 classroom at no charge. All requests MUST be booked through the Middle East Center Speaker's Bureau.
Robbie is an anthropologist and archaeologist with research interests primarily in Egypt and North Africa. His research is an historical and anthropological analysis of West Aswan (غرب اسوان), a collection of villages settled from 1902 by displaced Nubian communities. His project seeks to trace the ways in which the colonial administration valorized certain forms of economic subjectivity and the impact this had on interactions between Nubians and archaeological sites, how economic development projects reshaped Egyptian and Nubian landscapes and the consequences this had for marginalized communities and archaeological heritage, and finally to investigate how archaeological sites became construed as sites of contestation and resistance to forms of colonial (and neo-colonial) dispossession.
Robbie undertook his undergraduate and graduate degrees at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, concentrating on the archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa. Robbie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a graduate affiliate of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center,