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The Popularing Egypt cluster comprises four research topics:

Thomas Cook and the History of Mass Tourism in Egypt
Female Travelers: Amelia Edwards, Lucy Duff Gordon, and Florence Nightingale
Architecture: The “Egyptian Revival”
Remembering Cleopatra

Whether it is tourism, female travelers, architecture, or Cleopatra, Egypt’s popularization is a product of Western imagination. Across different forms of engagement, Westerners romanticized, distorted, and commodified Egyptian history and culture to fit their own ideals. In travel writing, art, and architecture, Egypt became less a real place and more a symbol onto which Westerners projected fantasies of power, immortality, and exoticism. This reimagining often involved glamorization and selective storytelling, erasing the complexities of Egyptian life in favor of Western notions of modernity and conquest. In the process, Western observers not only reshaped public perceptions of Egypt but also contributed to the appropriation and physical destruction of its cultural heritage, asserting dominance over both its historical narrative and material remains.

Thomas Cook and the History of Mass Tourism in Egypt

Thomas Cook and Egyptian Tourism explores the foundations of travel in Egypt and what travel tourism in Egypt looked like, from the places people would visit to the cities travelers frequented, to Thomas Cook’s business and how it came to be.

Thomas Cook & Mass Tourism

Female Travelers: Amelia Edwards, Lucy Duff Gordon, and Florence Nightingale

Women had uniquely gendered access to private and domestic spaces, and they provided perspectives on Egyptian culture that are vastly different from the more oriental, Imperialism-based, male-authored narratives of the time.

Female Travelers

Architecture: The “Egyptian Revival”

In 1830s US prisons and monuments, architects used Egyptian Revival Style architecture to project ideas of immortality and power onto different buildings to encourage rehabilitation and cement US cultural memory.

Egyptian Revival Style Architecture