Research

Mériam N. Belli received her PhD in Middle East history from Georgetown University in 2005. She joined the History Department at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2008. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the Arab Middle East. She earned an M.A. and a DEA (post-Masters thesis) in history at INALCO, Paris, France. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Remembrance of Nasserian Things Past: A Social and Cultural History of the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, explored historical representations and experiences through the history/stories of schooling and universal education; war and resistance and effigy-burning in Port Said; and communitarian memories and the Marian apparition of 1968 in Zaytun.

Mériam Belli has a particular interest in oral history, memory/remembrance, identities, nationalism, colonialism, and the visual arts, within the broad sphere of North Africa, Southwest Asia, and Europe. Besides working on her manuscript for publication, she is presently working on colonial and post-colonial urban space, urban imaginations in the colonial and post-colonial Middle East, the cities of the Suez Canal, and the construction of modern administrations in Southwest Asia through the prism of burial spaces.

Prior to coming Iowa, Mériam taught at Georgetown University; for Pepperdine University's internship program in Washington, DC; and at MIT from 2006 to 2008.