Anna Dowell

ANNA J. DOWELL, then a graduate student at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, was awarded a grant in October 2016 to aid research on ‘Evangelicalism in Egypt: Transformations of Citizenship and Piety among Protestants in Egypt,’ supervised by Dr. Rebecca L. Stein. This dissertation research explores the historical and contemporary entanglements of Protestant piety, nationalist imagination, and global flows or people, ideas, and material objects that produces the small, vocal Evangelical Egyptian community. Spanning archival research at the premiere Evangelical educational establishment in Egypt, years of participant observation and interviews in local churches, para-church organizations, and service organizations, and close analysis of music, publishing, and art, this research aims to explore how an indigenous religious identity and institution was produced and is being produced out of an historically colonially tinged Euro-American religious movement. This research aims to both trouble the notions of two over-determined categories — that of the evangelical believer and that of the Arab citizen — as well as produce a counterpoint to the anthropology of Christianity’s over-reliance on the notion of rupture as central to the contemporary explosion of charismatic/evangelical Christianity. The question of the difference that Christianity makes to both national and international aspirations and community building is pressing for both understanding Egypt in the years following the 2012 popular uprisings and the increased importance of understanding how nationalism interfaces with piety movements and evangelical/charismatic currents in other global spaces.