Dr. Menna Agha
Assistant Professor
Dr. Menna Agha is an architect and researcher who has recently been coordinating the spatial justice agenda at the Flanders Architecture Institute in Belgium. She joins the Azrieli School to promote pedagogy and research in the newly established area of Design and Spatial Justice. She is cross-appointed at Carleton University’s Institute for African Studies. Menna holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Antwerp, and a Master of Arts in Gender and Design from Köln International School of Design. In 2019/2020, she was the Spatial Justice Fellow and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. She is a third-generation displaced Fadicha Nubian, a legacy that infuses her research interests in race, gender, space, and territory. Among her publications are: Nubia still exists: The Utility of the Nostalgic Space; The Non-work of the Unimportant: The shadow economy of Nubian women in displacement villages; and Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance.
Research
2020 “Informality is a Fallacy” with Léopold Lambert, issue no 1477, The Self-Built, Architecture Review Magazine.
2020 “Affable Ghosts and Disembodied Territorialities in Stephanie Comilang’s Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso” Interview with Filmmaker Stephanie Camilang for E-flux Magazine.
2020 “Recognizing Nubian displaceability” issue no. 30, On Reparations, Funambulist Magazine
2020 Agha, Menna. “Emotional Capital, and the Other Ontology of the Architect” Architectural Histories Journal, issue on Fourth Wave Feminism.
2020 Agha, Menna Multi-gendered Identities: The contesting Nubian womanhood(s), Book section in “Breaking silence” [Arabic] Publisher: Maraya, Cairo.
2019 Agha, Menna “Non-work of the unimportant” Kohl journal of Body and Gender Research, issue on Alternative economies.
2019 Agha, Menna. “Nubia Still Exists: On the Utility of the Nostalgic Space” Humanities, special issue on Contemporary Nostalgia.
2019 “Female Genital Mutilation, Cutting, or Circumcision?” KOHL Journal for Body and Gender.
2018 “Women of the Dam” Page 4, A2 Magazine, Prague
2017 Agha, Menna. and DeVos, Els. “Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance” IDEA Journal, special issue on Dark Spaces.
2013 “Nubia, between the dream of return and the reality of migration” Report for the Committee of ‘Population, Health, and Housing’, National Specialized Councils, Cairo, Egypt
2012 Agha, Menna, and Nayoung Koh. 2012. “Inside and Outside: The Overlap of Social Conundrums.” 73–86. Book chapter in “House and Home” Publisher: Dakam, Istanbul.
2012 Fixed Monthly column in “Sawt el Nouba” A monthly newspaper on Nubian issues
Education
PhD, Architecture – University of Antwerp, 2019
MA, Integrated Design – Cologne University of Applied Sciences, 2011
BS, Architectural Engineering – October 6 University, 2009