Leyla Dakhli
When and where?
Leyla Dakhli is a historian specialising in the intellectual and social history of the contemporary Arab world. She is a research fellow at the CNRS, assigned to the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin. After a thesis on Syrian-Lebanese intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, published under the title Une Génération d'intellectuels arabes. Syrie-Liban, 1908-1940 (Karthala, 2009), she has devoted herself to work on women's mobilisations and feminisms, and has notably published Engagements féminins au Moyen-Orient, 2010 and a series of articles on both the Middle East and contemporary Tunisia.
Her analyses of intellectual worlds have also led her to focus on forms of belonging to nations and identities, for example by exploring the question of intellectual diasporas and writing languages through the worlds of the American Mahjar. She has published two syntheses on the contemporary Middle East (Histoire du Proche-Orient contemporain, "Repère" La Découverte, 2015; Le Moyen Orient fin XIXe-XXe siècle, éditions du Seuil, 2016). Since 2010-2011, she has observed and attempted to decipher contemporary events as a historian. Since 2018, she has been leading a research project on revolts and revolutions in the Arab world since the 1950s (ERC-CO DREAM, Drafting and Enacting the revolution in the Arab Mediterranean, online: https://dream.hypotheses.org/). She recently edited, in this context, L'Esprit de la révolte. Archives et actualité des révolutions arabes, Seuil, 2020 and, with Amin Allal, Layla Baamara and Giulia Fabbiano, Cheminements révolutionnaires. Un an de mobilisations en Algérie (2019-2020), CNRS éditions, 2021.