Munira Al-Mahdiyya

Yara completed her Ethnomusicology Masters dissertation entitled ‘Pioneers of Change: The Case of Munira al-Mahdiyya’ at SOAS, University of London in 2017. Her working doctoral study title is 'The Rise and Fall of the Wasla: Pioneers of Song through Egypt’s Nahda Era'. She is an Ertegun scholar working under the supervision of Professors Marilyn Booth and Walter Armbrust at the Oriental Institute, Oxford.

Research Interests

Her DPhil research looks at the music-making and listening practices of urban Egyptian society from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Against the backdrop of the Nahda or 'Arab Renaissance' and the early recording era, she investigates the musical 'wasla', the concept of tarab and its practitioners, asking how these both reflected and influenced social change and popular attitudes to nation and modernity. 


General interests: Arab musical practices- historic and contemporary; Arab cultural and intellectual history; Ottoman Egypt; the Nahda (Renaissance)


Recent Presentations/Conferences:

October 2017 - ‘The Oxford Maqam Project’, Postcolonial Seminar Series, English Department, University of Kent, UK
March 2017 - 'Egypt’s Living Heritage: Community Engagement in Recreating the Past’, Makan Egyptian Centre for Culture and Arts, Cairo, Egypt
November 2016 - ‘Recording with a Phonograph,’ Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, City University, London  
February 2016 - ‘Recording with a Phonograph’, Uludağ Üniversitesi Devlet Konservatuvarı, Bursa, Turkey  

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