On September 16th, CMEIS hosted Dr. Elizabeth Perego to honor her receipt of the 2024 Carolina’s Outstanding Contribution to Middle East Studies Book Award. Dr. Perego, Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University, began the day meeting with graduate and undergraduate students to discuss her groundbreaking text Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 – 2021. During this discussion, she emphasized the importance of humor as a historical category of analysis, explaining how jokes, cartoons, and other forms of humorous cultural production have been influential means of expressing political power throughout modern Algerian history.

In her evening lecture, Dr. Perego outlined shifts in the globally informed and creative ways Algerians have made sense of large scale political and social change through humor. Particularly focusing on the period of the Algerian Civil War (1992-2002), also known as The Black Decade, she described the pivotal ways that humor constituted a force of historical change as well as means for reconstructing said history. “Humor both shapes Algerian history and allows us to understand that history better.”