Elena Chiti Associate professor

I work as an Associate Professor ("Universitetslektor", non "docent") of Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University, which I joined in 2018-2019. I am a cultural historian of contemporary Egypt and a translator of literatures of the Arab world from Arabic and French into Italian.

From August to December 2025, I have been an academic visitor at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, thanks to a sabbatical grant from Stockholm University. I conducted research on the representations of female criminals (Rayya and Sakina) in the Egyptian popular culture from 1920 until today.

I am a research associate at LARHRA (Laboratoire de Recherche Historique en Rhône-Alpes, Lyon) and a member of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII). From 2018 to 2023, I have been a researcher on the team of the ERC-DREAM project ("Drafting and enacting revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean, from the 1950s until today"), led by Leyla Dakhli.

I hold a PhD in History of the Middle East from IREMAM/Aix-Marseille University ("mention très honorable avec félicitations du jury") and a Master in Arabic Language and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. I studied Arabic at Birzeit University and the University of Jordan. I lived and worked, as a teacher or a researcher, in Italy, France, Egypt, and Lebanon.

Teaching

I teach courses on history, societies, and cultures of the Middle East, for BA and MA levels. Since 2019, I have offered the MA course on "Revolutions in the MENA: Practices and Paradigms".

Research

As a historian, I am interested in cultural productions as sources to explore identity-making in times of social and political turmoil. From this perspective, I studied Alexandrian literary circles between the late 19th century and the first third of the 20th. I aimed to go beyond the cliché of “cosmopolitan Alexandria” to examine a period of conflicting horizons (the end of the Ottoman empire, the British occupation, the rise of Egyptian nationalism).

Since 2011, I applied the same perspective to the present and to popular culture, studying cultural productions connected with the recent uprisings in the Arab world, with a particular focus on Egypt.

I am currently engaged in a study of Egyptian criminal figures from 1920 until today, to investigate the construction of public morals in connection with national belonging in times of social and political turmoil.