He is the son of Richard Parnell and Jeanie Stallings and a 1997 graduate of Roanoke Rapids High School where he played baseball.
He received his graduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he also played baseball.
“Ever since he was a small child he always was fascinated and had a passion for history,” his father said today. “He always followed his dream and had a lot of support from his family.”
Parnell's dissertation is being supervised by professor Joel Gordon. History's resident Africanist professor Andrea Arrington also wrote in support of Parnell's Fulbright application.
In the dissertation, Parnell focuses on Egyptian youth al-shabab and the development of youth culture in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, he concentrates on new understandings, ideals, activities and representations of youth during this period from the perspectives of the young people themselves. Youth had often been the recipients and targets of colonist and nationalist projects, but how did youth engage, employ and contest such schemes? In addition, did new developments in the Egyptian public sphere, education and bourgeois consumption patterns lead to the development of a distinctive youth culture?
Modern Egyptian history is rich in textual sources due to the burgeoning of mass media capitalism. Thus, Parnell's first aim is to examine the prominent periodicals and articles written by Egyptian youth in Arabic fusha between 1890 and 1923 and found today in the Arabic Language Periodicals collection at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo. Secondly, he will turn his attention to media expressing Egyptian mass culture in colloquial Egyptian Arabic: the satirical press, vaudeville plays, songs, and colloquial poetry.
These sources are under researched but rich in politicized popular language, content, and symbolism. By probing the works of Egyptian youth within these genres, Parnell hopes to find a more nuanced picture of collective youth identities since colloquial media had a wider net of ideological dissemination. These sources are located at Dar al-Kutub in the Arabic Phonograph collection and the Arabic Language Periodical collections housed there.
Finally, Parnell will investigate Egyptian police records from the era in the hopes of gaining a picture of how new ideas of youth, youth political activism, and nationalism were disseminated and practiced in social spaces such as the coffeehouse, square, or street. By examining textual and non-textual media, Parnell's study will highlight youth as an essential force within political, social, and cultural contexts during this critical point in modern Egyptian history.
There is to be no profanity and there is to be no character assassination even if the person being written about is a suspect in a crime.
Comments that presume knowledge of a person’s home life, financial situation or other personal details will be not be posted as will comments which presume legal knowledge.
All comments must be on the topic of the story and offer the reader’s insight on a particular issue. rrspin.com will cease posting comments if the editor determines readers are infighting with one another and not staying on the topic of a story.
rrspin.com prefers readers use their real names because anonymous posters are accountable for their comments just as readers who post their names are.