Samuel Everett

Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Dr Samuel Everett joined the Woolf Institute in January 2015 to work with Dr Shana Cohen and Dr Ed Kessler as the researcher responsible for Paris on a major ethnographic research project investigating how crises are experienced and narrativised. Everett analyses the impact of crisis perceptions on trust in the state and in public institutions, on the one hand, and on practices of intercultural community life and solidarity, on the other. in relation to the concept of Trust across Berlin, Paris, Rome and London. Though the role is particularly demanding role in light of recent tragic events he is delighted to continue and extend his research in line with the Institute’s philosophy of education, outreach and academia.

Everett was awarded his doctorate in February 2014 at SOAS, University of London. Maghrebinicité – the portmanteau term that melds Maghreb and Cité - as coined in his thesis, is the heuristic tool he developed to investigate the spatial and historical dimensions of Parisian Jewish identification with North Africa since 1981. His doctoral research, based on information collected using an interdisciplinary approach - including the use of oral histories, extensive ethnographies, and cultural studies techniques - analyses migratory trajectories and their interpretation inter-generationally. It teases out many affective and cultural commonalities between Jewish and Muslim descendants of North Africa in Paris.

As Senior Teaching Fellow in Diaspora and Migration and Teaching Fellow in Politics of the Middle East at SOAS 2012-2014 Everett led seminars, lectured and supervised courses close to his fields of expertise. He specialises in transnationalism, affective politics, and the complexity of postcolonial identification, with particular regard to Algeria, France, and Morocco. While studying for his PhD, he worked on a variety of academic projects including now published monographs by prominent scholars in the fields of Critical Human Rights and Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora. Everett was awarded a Leverhulme Trust studentship in 2010 that enabled him to undertake multi-sited fieldwork in Paris, North Africa and Jerusalem. He was hosted by INALCO in Paris 2010-12.