Omnia El Shakry is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007), as well as articles on the history of the human sciences in Egypt, and on gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. Her current book project Theorizing the Soul: Self and Psyche in Twentieth Century Egypt, traces the development of discourses of self, psyche, and subjectivity in postwar Egypt as part of the transnational history of ideas and comparative social history. An essay from this project titled, "The Arabic Freud: the Unconscious and the Modern Subject," is forthcoming in the Journal Modern Intellectual History. She has recently expanded her work on the Middle East to include the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the contemporary visual arts, with articles appearing in e-flux, Third Text, and Nafas art magazine.