The presentation of Mona Abaza's book 'The Cotton Plantation Remembered' (The American University in Cairo Press (AUC Press) - 2013) will be essentially about the process of crafting a work, rather, the “why” and “how” of writing a family history. While the main thread of this book has been an attempt at how to weave text with photography, both means the visual and the word engage with nostalgia in a conscious ambiguous way. Ambiguity is perhaps here much revealing of the tensions between nearness and distance to the tale, between the sociologist´s gaze and the unresolved emotional realm.

Mona Abaza is professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, AUC The American University in Cairo. She was a visiting professor of Islamology in the Department of Theology at Lund University (2009-2011).

Mona Abaza's former positions:
Former chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology, The American University in Cairo (2007- 2009).
Visiting scholar at the Institute for South East Asian Studies, Singapore (1990 -1992), Kuala Lumpur (1995 - 1996), L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1994), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1996 - 1997), The International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2002 - 2003), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar (2006 - 2007) and the Rockefeller Foundation (2005). Research Fellow at Morphomata, Cologne, 2014.