Even before submitting her doctoral dissertation “The Making of Counter-Insurgent Geographies in Post-Revolutionary Cairo, Baltaga and Maslaha at Bulaq Abule’lla,” Omnia Khalil (Ph.D. ’23) joined the anthropology department at the City College of New York as a lecturer.

At the end of her last research trip to Cairo, she realized she couldn’t return to her home city again. By 2021, her various writings on Egypt’s geographic transformations, securitization, and their effects on the country’s urban poor had made her too well known, and in danger of arrest.

Click here to read her interview with the Graduate Center.