Contact Information
3070 FLB
Professor
Research Interests
Modern Arabic, Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone literatures, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, translation studies, methods of comparative & world literature
Awards and Honors
Second Vice President (January 2025-January 2026), Modern Language Association of America. To become Vice President in 2026-27, President in 2027-28.
President (2019-20), American Comparative Literature Association. Vice President (2018-19), Second Vice President (2017-18).
American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship, 2017.
University Scholar, UIUC, 2016-19.
Additional Campus Affiliations
- Department of Comparative & World Literature
- Department of French & Italian
- Department of Spanish & Portuguese
- Department of Asian American Studies
- Program in Translation & Interpreting Studies
- Center for African Studies
- Center for Global Studies
- Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
- Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
- European Union Center
- Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies
- Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Highlighted Publications
Books:
- Editor, O mundo árabe e o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Makunaima, 2024.
- Author, Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism. Oxford University Press, 2024.
- Co-editor (with Rogério Lima), Literatura e (i)migração no Brasil/Literature and (Im)migration in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Makunaima, 2020.
- Editor, The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Translator (Portuguese-Arabic), لغز القاف from the Portuguese O enigma de Qaf by Alberto Mussa. Cairo, Egypt: The National Center for Translation, 2015. Novel.
- Co-editor (with Susan Muaddi Darraj), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. MLA publications, 2012.
- Author, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. Oxford University Press, 2011. Paperback 2014.
- Translator (Arabic-English), Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, from the Arabic لن تتكلم لغتي by Abdelfattah Kilito, with notes and a critical introduction. Syracuse University Press, 2008. Scholarly monograph. A 2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
- Author, Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse University Press, 2003.
Special Issues:
- Geopolitics of Comparison: An ACLA Presidential Forum. Comparative Literature 73:3 (2021): 255-269.
- Arab Latin America. A special issue of Review 99: Literature and Arts of the Americas 52:2 (December 2019).
- Arabic Literature Now: Between Area Studies and the New Comparatism (with Amal Amireh). A Special issue of Comparative Literature Studies 47:4 (2010).
- Comparative (Post)colonialisms (with Rebecca Saunders). A special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 23: 1-2 (2003).
- Études sur la littérature égyptienne (with Evelyne Accad). Special issue of Peuples méditerranéens / Mediterranean Peoples 77 October-December 1996.
- Nouvelles d’Égypte (with Evelyne Accad). Special issue of Peuples méditerranéens / Mediterranean Peoples 76 July-September 1996.