Theatre Research
My research centers on political drama, collaborative theatre-making, and translation. I co-edited, co-translated and wrote the introduction to the anthology Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution (Seagull Books), which received a Literature in Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. I have published reviews and articles in Modern Drama, Arab Stages, The Voice and Speech Review, American Theatre Magazine, The Mercurian, and presented at the ASTR, IFTR, and VASTA conferences.
“Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution promises an invaluable teaching and dramaturgical resource… The plays are deftly and elegantly rendered in English, producing texts that Anglophone university students will be able to read and embody with little difficulty. The volume is thus a valuable resource for students and teachers interested in introducing audiences to a range of performance histories and political questions… But the value of Albakry and Maggor’s volume is not limited to students of theatre and drama. The collection also promises to be an excellent resource for students and teachers of the humanities writ large.”
In my recent research, I have focused on contemporary Arabic theatre companies from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. I interrogate these companies’ plays as literary works, attending to themes, forms, and genre. More broadly, however, I situate these works in their social and historical contexts, looking to understand both the dramatists – their backgrounds, training, sources of inspiration, artistic and political objectives – and the dense ecosystem in which their companies operate, including social networks, ensemble collaborations, cultural institutions, public venues, sources of funding, and audiences. I have translated nearly a dozen plays from Arabic to English and staged many of them in readings and productions across the U.S. (PEN World Voices, the Huntington Theatre Company, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Cornell, etc.) While at Cornell I have worked to raise the profile of “translation as scholarship” by helping to launch the “Translation Network” through the Society for the Humanities and organizing the major international conference Drama Across Borders, with a specific focus on the politics and poetics of theatre in translation.
I co-edited, co-translated and wrote the introduction to the anthology Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution (Seagull Books), which received a Literature in Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Tahrir Tales is a collection of ten Egyptian plays, translated from Arabic, that offer popular perspectives on the jubilation, terror, hope and heartbreak of mass uprising. In my introduction, I embed these plays within a rich tapestry of performance events during the recent uprising and contextualize them within a long history of anti-colonial and radically democratic protest theatre in Egypt.
As a Fulbright scholar in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program I studied Palestinian theatre and performance. I am currently working on a collection of new Palestinian drama in translation, Khashabi Theatre in Haifa: Palestinian Consciousness in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization.