Nadeem Mansour is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the University Committee on Asia at Columbia University and MESAAS. His current research focuses on the late 19th-century Egyptian ruling class, its formation, and the role of this class in negotiating Egypt’s concurrent positions as a province in the Ottoman Empire, as an imperial force in its own right in Sudan and East Africa, and a British-occupied territory by 1882. His research interests include questions of imperialism, social history, political economy, class dynamics, and labor. He teaches courses including ‘Imperialism in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa,’ and ‘Imperialism in Africa: The Cape to Cairo Corridor’

Mansour received his PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2025. He completed his BA degree in Political Economy at the American University in Cairo (2010) and an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University (2017).

Mansour is the co-founder (2009) and former director of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR). After the 2011 revolution, ECESR became one of Egypt’s most influential human rights NGOs, providing direct services to tens of thousands of beneficiaries and working with hundreds of local grassroots organizations and trade unions. In addition to ECESR, Mansour worked with several institutions, including the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo, the Open Society Foundation, and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center.