Nominees for the BRISMES Council (2025-2028)

Aya Nassar

Dr Aya Nassar is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Durham University. Her research focuses on urban questions in the Middle East, specifically Cairo, Egypt. Her work has covered themes of memory, archiving, (geo)poetics of space, infrastructure and affective and material aspects of cities. Her doctoral research included investigating the archives of national Egyptian architects who were designing plans for post-colonial/post-independence Cairo. Since then, she has focused on the aesthetics and poetics used to represent and depict Arab cities after 2011, neighbourhood storytelling and memory, and space and memory work in Egypt.

Nassar has an interdisciplinary approach having been trained in Politics and Human Geography, her work also interfaces with the Arts and Humanities through working with artists, visual approaches, and poetics. Nassar has taught and worked in Cairo University, Egypt and therefore has a good sense of diverse Higher Education settings within and beyond the UK. She informally mentors colleagues from the region navigation research and publication in UK academic settings. She is further one of the editors of the bilingual platform Arab Urbanism that showcases early career work from the region on architecture and urbanism. Nassar has been an active member in BRISMES ever since its democratisation process. She has previously acted as student paper mentor, dissertation reviewer and, overall, she is invested in the society and its membership’s concerns.