Counterpoints

May Telmissany is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Arabic Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include an authored volume in Arabic on the documentary filmmaker Fouad El Tohamy, as well as co-edited/co-authored books in French on the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Heliopolis, and the history of public bathhouses in Cairo. An English translation of her book The Last Hammams of Cairo was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2009. Her current research project is titled Reel Good Arabs: The Arab filmmakers of the Diaspora. May Telmissany is also a confirmed Egyptian-Canadian novelist. The French version of her novel Dunyazad (Actes-Sud, Paris) was awarded the Ulysses Prize for Best first novel in 2002 in France and the State Prize for autobiographical novel in Cairo the same year.

Stephanie Tara Schwartz is a Doctoral Student and Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Research Assistant at the Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies at Ryerson University. She was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2008–2010) for her project entitled “Double Diaspora in the Literature and Film of Arab Jews.” Her work on the concept of double diaspora in the writings of Sami Michael and Naim Kattan is published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.