Arabic Lit in Contemp Humanities Curriculum Participants

2014 Colloquiua participants

Samer Ali – UT Austin

Samer Ali is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages. His publications have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Islam, the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Journal of Arabic Literature. He has received five Fulbright Awards for his research, which have funded studies of Arabic manuscripts at archives in Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Germany and Spain. As a service to the profession, Prof. Ali moderates Cairo Scholars, an email listserve that supports the life and living of students and scholars in Cairo.

Ahmad Almallah – Middlebury College

Ahmad Almallah is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Arabic Literature at Middlebury College. His research interests include Abbasid Arabic poetry, its translation and reception. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Hanadi Al-Samman – University of Virginia

Hanadi Al-Samman is an associate professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature, diaspora and sexuality studies, as well as transnational and Islamic feminism(s). She published several articles in Journal of Arabic Literature, Women’s Studies International Forum, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and Mapping Arab Women’s Movements edited collection. Co-editor (with Tarek El-Ariss) of an International Journal of Middle East Studies’ special issue “Queer Affects,” and author of a forthcoming book from Syracuse University Press, Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings.

Hussain Abulfaraj

Hussain Abulfaraj is an assistant professor at the department of Arabic Language and literature at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Culture at Bloomington, Indiana.

Sayed Elsisi – University of Maryland

Sayed Elsisi came to UMD from Harvard University (2007-2010), where he taught advanced courses: “Arabic Cultural, literary and Political Readings.” He taught before at The American University in Cairo (2000-2007), in the CASA Program, Modern and Classical Arabic Literature courses, in addition to Advanced courses of Arabic MSA and Egyptian Colloquial in Arab Cinema. Dr. Elsisi earned his PhD with the first honor degree for his dissertation “The Arabic Prose Poem: Study in the Poetics of the Genre” at Cairo University, where he also received his BA (1993) and MA (awarded as the best dissertation in Arabic Literature, 2000). He worked as a researcher and an editorial assistant for “Alif”(Journal of Comparative Poetics) 2000-2007. His publications (in Arabic) include: “Alluring Text and Playful Reading” (2005), “Egypt: Culture and Society”, a textbook for the CASA program (2006), and a number of articles on the Arabic novel and poetry: “Sufi Vision to the Poetic Language in Salah Abdul Sabour’s Poetry”(2003), “Absence as Strategy in Sa’di Yussuf’s Poetry: An Intertextuality Approach” (2001),”The Realism in Conjuncture of al-Ard novel”(1994). Dr. Elsisi is currently working on a project to study The Omitted Genres throughout the history of Arabic criticism – questioning the “Poetics” in classical and modern Arabic literary criticism.