CAF Members

Hannah Elsisi

Hannah Elsisi holds a PhD in history from the University of Oxford. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Before joining Cambridge, she was a lecturer in Modern Middle East History at King’s College London while completing her PhD at Oxford. Her dissertation charts the history of political imprisonment, repression, and torture in Modern Egypt. For this work, she was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in 2020 and the Leigh Douglas Memorial Award by the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES) in 2021. She is wrapping up that research project with two forthcoming books, Lovers in the Citadel: Prisons and Other Architectures of Subjection in Egypt and an anthology Behind the Sun: Prison Writing in an Egyptian Century. Beyond her research on political and intellectual movements in the Middle East, Hannah has extensive experience working with fellow academics in the region, human rights organisations, grassroots groups and media fora around issues of academic and political freedoms, revolutionary mobilisation and repression.