Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, pedagogue, and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind events shaping world history. She is currently working on a book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. As an associate fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung at EUME (2017–24), she started the project “Tracing Emancipation under Rubbles of War,” which examines the physical and political journeys of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoirs that recount their struggles. She is currently an associate researcher in the “Towards Sonic Resocialization” project at the Lautarchiv of Berlin’s Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, which aims to facilitate the return of an archive of voice recordings of North African prisoners of war to their home countries and communities. Some of her research-based articles, essays, and short stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public-history project “Ihky ya Tarikh.” She has also taught at the American University in Cairo, Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.