Nous accueillons Carl ROMMEL 

Carl ROMMEL est actuellement chercheur au New College Europe de Bucarest (Roumanie). Il est accueilli à l'IREMAM du 19 mars au 5 mai 2026.

Titre de son projet de recherche : Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Masculinity in President el-Sisi’s New Republic.

"My anthropological research examines dreams taking the shape of “projects” (mashari‘) in contemporary Egypt. As lower-middle class men devise small business projects for profit making and social improvement, the military-backed regime undertakes spectacular megaprojects in the desert to showcase its grandeur and national-development ambitions.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, media analysis and historical data, the research analyses social, economic and political effects of Egyptian project dreams across scales. It showcases how politicians and ordinary citizens alike turn to mashari‘ to set material and social improvements in motion.

Centering the analytic “project dreamwork,” my study foregrounds a ubiquitous template for future-making that has often been pushed to the background. In this way, I seek to inaugurate an anthropology of the project form, injecting the project at the center of interdisciplinary debates about aspiration, masculinity and authoritarian statecraft.

To date, I have conducted twenty-five months of fieldwork in Cairo, primarily during a research project funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. In the 2025-2026 academic year, I am completing a book manuscript based on this data during a research fellowship at New Europe College in Bucharest, and a research visit at IREMAM. Moving across spheres and scales, my monograph on Egyptian project-making will foster unique bottom-up perspectives both on Cairo’s informal economy and on the desert developments that President el-Sisi calls The New Republic (al-gumhuriyya al-gadida)".

Carl ROMMEL est joignable à l'adresse électronique suivante : carlrommel[at]gmail.com