Interview with Faculty Fellow Nancy Reynolds
In the hot southern Egypt sun, a monument to modern ambition bisects the Nile — a massive rockfill dam once hailed as a triumph of engineering, anticolonial defiance and national pride. But beneath the surface of this vast construction lies a deeper, more complex story — one of displacement, Cold War deal-making, pan-Arab solidarity and shifting landscapes both physical and political.
In her current book project, “Stone by Stone: The Landscape Politics of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, 1956–1973,” historian Nancy Reynolds draws on a rich trove of archival materials, oral histories, ecological studies and cultural texts to offer a humanistic interpretation of one of the 20th century’s most iconic infrastructure projects.
