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Mercedes Volait
Mercedes Volait is a research professor at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, based at the research unit InVisu in Paris. Affiliated with the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London since 2015, she is currently engaged in research on the iconography and topography of nineteenth-century Cairo, and on the early collecting and commodification of Islamic artefacts from Egypt and Syria. Her publications include Fous du Caire: excentriques, architectes & amateurs d’art en Égypte, 1863–1914 (Archange Minotaure, 2009), and Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle (Picard and Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2013). She co-curated an exhibition on the Italian photographer Beniamino Facchinelli (1839–1895) in Paris in 2017 and is supervising the online catalogue of its Cairo views (http://facchinelli.huma-num.fr/).