Fayrouz Kaddal is a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology. Her interests are around: music, sound archives, displacement, circulation/repatriation, Nubia, Egypt, migration. Kaddal's PhD project titled Sunken Voices, Sunken Music: Circulating Nubian Sound archives with Nubians in Egypt and Kenya, is a multi-sited ethnography between Vienna in Austria, the displaced villages of Nubia, in Egypt and Kibera, in Kenya, that seeks to explore the different potentialities in circulating and repatriating sound archives of endangered communities.
The project looks back at UNESCO's famous Save Nubia campaign, launched in consequence of the Aswan High Dam, the drowning of Nubia and the displacement of its people. The project focuses on a collection of sound
recordings collected by the Austrian anthropologist Anna Hohenwart-Gerlachstein, in response to UNESCO's campaign. Circulating Gerlachstein's sound recordings amongst Egyptians Nubians and Kenyan Nubians, Kaddal seeks to understand the different potentialities in circulating and repatriating sound archives in complete two different temporal, historical, spatial and mobility contexts. Also, she asks how circulation of sound archives can be important for the community of origin and other communities who share the same ethnicity.
Prior to joining Duke, Fayrouz was an Adjunct Lecturer of music at the American University in Cairo (AUC). She completed her MA in Sociology-Anthropology (2021) at the AUC. Her thesis dissertation, titled On Displacement and Music: Embodiments of Contemporary Nubian Musical Practices, looks at the intersection between music, migration and displacement from an auto-ethnographic account as a Nubian musician. The dissertation is currently under review for a publication for Cairo Papers, AUC Press.