Francesca Biancani

Francesca Biancani graduated in Oriental History from the University of Bologna in 2003. She continued her studies at SOAS (School of Oriental Studies) in London, where she obtained an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies in 2005. In 2012, she obtained a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science . Since 2010, she has taught Middle Eastern History and Institutions, Political Development, and International Relations of the Middle East at the University of Bologna. In 2017, she was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at IFAO (Institut français d'archéologie orientale) and CEDEJ (Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales) in Cairo, Egypt.

Since November 2018, she has been a Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna. Francesca Biancani is an expert in the history, institutions, and society of the modern and contemporary Middle East. She has primarily researched the colonial history of the modern Middle East, with a particular interest in colonial and semi-colonial Egypt (1882–1952) and the role that biopolitical conceptions of gender, sex, and race played in shaping local or vernacular governmental arrangements and forms of modernity. Her main contribution to the academic literature on the topic is a monograph entitled “ Sex Work in Colonial Egypt. Women, Modernity, and the Global Economy ” (IB Tauris 2018), a history of the regulation of sex work in colonial Egypt as a biopolitical project, central, it is argued, to understanding the process of Egyptian modernization at the intersection of imperial and nationalist politics. A second, more recent line of research has partially developed from this and explores the relationship between gender, mobility, labor, and the role of trans-Mediterranean female migration in the construction of the cosmopolitan order in Egypt between the two world wars. Francesca Biancani is currently working on a European Research Council (ERC) proposal on everyday cosmopolitanism, normative constructions, and grassroots practices of citizenship and nationality in Egypt between the two world wars, based on a systematic and innovative analysis of largely overlooked consular sources. Other ongoing research includes a diachronic analysis of forms of statehood and sovereignty in the Middle East, and the politics of nostalgia and memory in the contemporary Middle East.