via Hyperallergic
Digitizing a Beloved Egyptian Scholar’s Archive
by Mostafa Heddaya on December 19, 2013
Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady (right) with wife, Anna Bamford, and children circa 1927 (all images via Joy Garnett on Flickr)
Ahmed Zaky Abushady was a polymath in the Victorian mold, a preeminent Egyptian literary figure, bee scientist, inventor, and physician who found pathways between modes of thought and scholarship long before “interdisciplinary” became an academic catchall. Though his life’s work has received wide-ranging honors (he’s even appeared on a commemorative Egyptian postal stamp), no archive of his personal and scholarly effects exists. One is now in the works thanks to the efforts of Abushady’s granddaughter, the Brooklyn-based artist and writer Joy Garnett. The proposed archive, for which Garnett is raising funds via the online platform Hatchfund, would preserve and translate the vast collection of artifacts from his life she inherited in 2008.
Born in Egypt and educated in London, Abushady had a career that spanned stints in Alexandria, Egypt, New York City, and Washington, D.C., where he passed away in 1955. Though he studied to become a physician, Abushady was, over the course of his life, a prolific inventor and founder of institutes, societies, and publications. Among his achievements in publishing alone, the literary journal Apollo (1932–34) is today regarded as a landmark of 20th-century Arab Romanticism....
[Read the full article on Hyperallergic]
