Ingvild Tomren

Academic interests

Popular culture and music in the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt. My research interests also include sociolinguistics, diglossia, and the Arabic speech community.

My Ph.D. project explores Egyptian popular music and protest songs in the early 20th century, during the latter part of the Nahḍa. I am interested in how ordinary people were marked and imagined to feel in the song texts/poems, and in what ways the music represented a counterculture in this transformative period.

Background

I completed my Master's in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic at IKOS in the spring of 2015. My research topic was on a new genre within Egyptian youth music and I conducted fieldwork in Cairo. The thesis focused on how the music served as a means of expression and outlet for young marginalized Egyptians in an authoritative state. I also have a Bachelor of Middle Eastern Studies from IKOS, in addition to two semesters of language exchange at the International Language Institute in Cairo. In the first year of my Bachelor I studied Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

In addition to my studies I have gained working experience from a variety of jobs including counseling, freelance translation, teaching and providing information to asylum seekers in Arabic. I also participated in the IKOS based project "In 2016" where I contribute with an article on pop music and underground music in Egypt after the Arab spring. Since the spring of 2022, I am the co-editor of Babylon – Nordic journal for Middle Eastern Studies.