Unwinding the Tapes: Egypt's Cassette Culture | Andrew Simon
Andrew Simon talked about his latest book "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt." Media of the Masses investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores.
Andrew Simon is a historian of media, popular culture, and the modern Middle East. He holds a B.A. in Arabic, Middle East, and Islamic Studies from Duke University and was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and is currently serving as a lecturer at Dartmouth. Andrew's interdisciplinary research has received generous support from the Social Science Research Council and the American Research Center in Egypt, and his work has been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and cited in the Washington Post. Andrew's first book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (2022), is forthcoming with Stanford University Press and shares the extraordinary story of an ordinary object.
Outline
This podcast series features a process-focused conversation that looks at a guest's individual projects rather than their full bodies of work. It sketches the journey of the project: the spark of curiosity that led to its birth, the process of implementing the idea, the obstacles that emerged throughout the implementation, and the aftermath of the project, including new questions and new ideas.
