My Egypt Archive

Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of four previous books and editor of another.

“Mikhail casts the Cairo archive as a microcosm of modern Egypt. Its hierarchies, rivalries, petty cruelties, decay, neglect, corruption and anomie supply the material and the trigger for his reflections on the condition of his ancestral land.”—Wall Street JournalWinner of the 2023 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology“What an entertaining, infuriating and incisive book Alan Mikhail has written. To assess the state of modern Egypt via the stories of its national archives is such a brilliant means of getting at the small workings of a society—from the maddening sludge of the country’s ever-present bureaucracy to the way so much of daily life revolves around arbitrary rules, selectively enforced. My Egypt Archive is a wonderful bridge of a book, spanning the chasm between scholarly research and deeply personal reflection, history as profession and history as marrow.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise“In this beautifully written book, Mikhail records his personal story as a young Egyptian-American historian maneuvering the labyrinthine Egyptian archives. He cleverly interweaves entries on daily encounters with aloof bureaucrats and intimate interactions with fellow researchers with his critique of Egyptian politics and nationalistic history.”—Zeinab Abul-Magd, author of Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt“A remarkably detailed ethnography and beautifully written, thought-provoking, and sensitive memoir that provides a fascinating perspective on state control, bureaucracy, and class structure in modern Egypt.”—Talal Asad, City University of New York