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Nora Lafi

Nora Lafi (Istres, near Marseille, 1965) is a historian (PhD, 1999; Habilitation, 2011) who specializes in the study of the Ottoman empire and of the societies of the Middle East and North Africa with a specific focus on urban history and on the governance of diversity.

She works at Universität Erfurt as a Senior Research Fellow of the research group Religion and Urbanity, part of the Max-Weber-Kolleg.

At Leibniz-ZMO Berlin she has been chairing from 2020 to 2024 the international and collaborative research project HISDEMAB of the Leibniz-Association on the theme of the historicity of democracy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. In 2023-2024, she worked as Senior Research Fellow at MECAM Tunis.

She is also chairing (2024-2026), together with Suaad Al-Ghafal, the Ghadames Heritage Project, based at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

Nora Lafi is a Privat Dozentin at the Freie Universität of Berlin (Graduate School Muslim Culture and Societies). She co-chairs with U. Freitag the Cities Compared: Governance, Consultative Mechanisms and Plurality project within the EUME programme (Forum Transregionale Studien).

She is part of the Editorial Board of the scholarly journals Planning Perspectives (Routledge) and Urban History (Cambridge University Press). She serves as a UNESCO World Heritage expert for ICOMOS.

She has published on both the Middle East and North-Africa, in both Ottoman and colonial times.

One of her central thematic approaches pertains to the governance of the cities of the Arab world in Ottoman times. Her main contribution to scholarly debates is about the existence of a local urban sphere of municipal and civic governance in Ottoman cities:

Esprit civique et organisation citadine dans l’empire ottoman (Brill, 2018)

Une ville du Maghreb entre ancien régime et réformes ottomanes (L’Harmattan, 2002)

Municipalités méditerranéennes (ed., K. Schwarz, 2005 [Arabic Translation 2016 by National Center for Translation, Cairo])

Urban Governance Under the Ottomans (ed. with U. Freitag, 2014, Paperback 2017)

A central argument in Nora Lafi’s approach to the relationship between the societies of the region and the sphere of power is related to the study of petitions in Ottoman times:

Petitions and Accommodating Urban Change in the Ottoman Empire (2011)

Nora Lafi’s research thus also poses the question of the nature of the Ottoman forms of urbanity:

Urbanity as an Ethic in Moser and Ege (eds.), Urban Ethics, Routledge 2020

Nora Lafi’s research posture includes considerations pertaining to historical anthropology.

Of urban violence:

Urban Violence in the Middle East (ed. with U. Freitag, N. Fuccaro and C. Ghrawi)

And of the spatialities of religion:

Daily Life Spatialities and Temporalities of Religion in Ottoman Tunis, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte (2023, 25-1, p.309-333). (PDF available here),

Conceptualising Urbanity, Reinterpreting Coexistence: A ḥisba Manuscript of the Late Ottoman Era in TunisReligion and Urbanity Online, edited by S. Rau and J. Rüpke. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2022.

The Complex Nature of Urban Boundaries in the Ottoman Empire (with F. Riedler)

Nora Lafi has also tackled the question of governance in present-day Arab countries:

The ‘Arab Spring’ in Global Perspective” (2017)

Mediterranean Cosmopolitanism and its Contemporary Revivals: a Critical Approach” (2013);

Understanding the City through its Margins (Co-ed)

Longue-Durée Reflections on Anti-Colonial Movements in the Middle-East (1798–today)” in The Routledge Handbook of EU-Middle East Relations, edited by D. Bouris, D. Huber and M. Pace (Abingdon, Routledge, 2022)

Urban Open Spaces

Building and Destroying Authenticity in Aleppo (2017)

She has published also on questions of women’s and gender history:

Finding women and gender in the sources: toward a historical anthropology of Ottoman Tripoli” (2018)

Female Agency and Colonial Repression: Memory and Archives in Tunisia” (MECAM Papers) also available in French and Arabic

Read here Nora Lafi’ Carnet de recherche (2020-2024)