Arwa Labidi
Arwa Labidi is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Jendouba. She holds a PhD on the construction of national narratives in the Maghreb, defended in 2019 at Paris Nanterre University. Her research now focuses on forms of colonial repression and social uprisings in 20th century Tunisia. In 2024–2025, she was a Hazem ben Gacem Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Harvard University.
Arwa Labidi is the author of two series of historical investigations published by the Tunisian media outlet Inkyfada between 2020 and 2023: Gens suspects (Suspicious People) and Le dessous des dates (Beyond the Dates). In 2026, she published the chapter « “The Day we were Determined”: The Ghosts of 26 January 1978” in the collective volume edited by Leyla Dakhli and Laurence Dufresne Aubertin, Struggles for Dignity: Mapping Resistance in the Arab World (Polity Press).
Journals presented by Arwa Labidi
Habib al-Umma (Friend of the Nation), a short-lived communist newspaper published in Tunisia in 1921, was a site for imagining forms of political solidarity that challenged the racial, and class divisions structuring French colonial rule. Directed by Mokhtar Ayari, a tramway worker and member of the Tunisian Section of the Communist Party, the newspaper emerged […]