Maurice Chammah

Maurice Albert Chammah
photograph by Lydia Crafts, July 3, 2009
Texas After Violence Project office

Maurice Chammah graduated from Cornell University in May 2010 in Near Eastern Studies and the College Scholar Program. He has studied and done research in Cairo, Egypt and volunteer work with Rabbis for Human Rights in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He also plays with a handful of bands in Austin, including Oikos and Mother Falcon. He plans to pursue graduate work in Anthropology or Government and return to the Middle East for research and language study, and his interests generally focus on the anthropology of the Middle East and Islam, secularism, and media in Egypt, and he has written about some of that here. While at Cornell, Maurice took a course on the history and law of the death penalty in the United States.

At the American University in Cairo, Maurice took a course with our friend Mark Westmoreland, who -- working Tony Cherian as the as the Seed Documentary Co-op -- helped develop our oral history protocol, provided our first oral history training, and evaluated our first set of interviews before leaving for Cairo in the summer of 2008. Professor Westmoreland suggested that Maurice look up the Texas After Violence Project, and so he did. Maurice volunteered with the project during the summer of 2009 and became a staff member on August 23, 2010.

In this photograph, Maurice stands in front of "Innocent Age" by Kathy Vargas, produced as part of The Serie Project (Serie 13, 2005-2006) at Coronado Studio in Austin.