A graduate in Philosophy (Paris-1 Sorbonne and Nanterre) and in Chinese language and civilization (INALCO, Paris), Laure Guirguis holds a PhD in Political Studies from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris). 

In my first book, based on my PhD Dissertation and entitled "Les Coptes d'Égypte: Violences communautaires et transformations politiques 2005-2012", I combine political, anthropological and social historical approaches to analyze how social and individual practices reproduce a political order based on the multilayered subjugation of the Christian minority, drawing on the theories of (de)secularization to understand the contemporary politicization of religious leadership and to explain how the state became the main agent obstructing the process of secularization among the Coptic community. It includes a study on the attitudes of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood towards Copts, as well as on the evolution of this organization.

Before joining the OIB, I have been pursuing my research for two years at the University of Montreal as a Banting postdoctoral Fellow. At that time, I wrote my second book, which was published by Laval University Presses in 2014 under the title "Égypte: révolution et contre-révolution". 

I now engage in a long-term research on Arab leftist trends in the 1960-1970 in a cross-regional perspective. Indeed, the study of leftwing radicalism from 1960-1970 requires a transnational approach, which allows us to decipher the dialectical processes of social, discursive, and symbolical practices whose interconnections are constitutive of structuring continuities. Focusing on Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt, I do not engage in a comparative study; rather, I consider them as circulation nodes bundling and easing the diffusion and the transformation of activists’ practices, be they political, discursive or symbolical. I pay particular attention to the impact of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, and Algerian revolutionary models and strategies on Arab left-wing syntax, tactics, and revolutionary thought. This project also brings into conversation gray literature, literary publications, and cinema, which have proved to be an important forum for political struggle and expression---even in support of the regime, as it was the case in the Nasserian state---thereby combining methodological tools which stem from different disciplinary fields.