Critical Friends

Professor Stefan Sperl (SOAS)

Stefan Sperl is Head of Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East at SOAS. He studied Arabic at Oxford and the American University in Cairo and completed his PhD at SOAS. His research interests include classical and modern Arabic literature and comparative literature. Stefan’s publications include The Cosmic Script: Sacred Geometry and the Science of Arabic Penmanship (2014, with Ahmed Moustafa), Mannerism in Arabic Poetry (1989), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia & Africa (1996, with Christopher Shackle), as well as articles on Arabic, Islamic and Refugee Studies.

Professor Marilyn Booth (Oxford University)

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World and Professor and Director of Research, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford since 2015. Prior to this, Marilyn taught at Brown University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Edinburgh and New York University Abu Dhabi. She completed a BA at Harvard-Radcliffe College and PhD at St. Antony’s College. Marilyn’s current research focuses on nineteenth-century feminism and women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria along with the emergence of the Arabic novel. Recent publications include Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (2015) and May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (2001).

Professor Ziad Elmarsafy (King’s College London)

Ziad Elmarsafy is Professor of Comparative Literature at King’s College London. He is the author of Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2012) and has published in areas including the literature and culture of early modern France, the Enlightenment and modern Arabic literature. His current research focuses on the reception of Sufi themes and ideas by Western thinkers and writers.

Professor Catherine Servan-Schreiber (CNRS Paris)

Catherine Servan-Schreiber is Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asia (CNRS/EHESS), Paris, and she also teaches Bhojpuri and Avadhi languages and literature at INALCO (Paris).

As part of the MULSOIGE project, Sevan-Schreiber led a week-long course with Camille Buat, exploring living traditions in the Bhojpuri language of Northern India. This course shared methodologies for studying the circulation of Bhojpuri texts, singers, and labourers and explored the interface between literature and history.

Dr Nora Parr

Dr Nora Parr is Postdoctoral Researcher for the Open World Research Initiative’s project on Creative Multilingualism. Her work explores the nexus of literature, theory, and translation. Her research for the AHRC-funded project examines notions of trauma in Arabic Literature from the Levant and Egypt.

Dr Nora Parr has contributed to MULOSIGE’s Syllabus “Multilingual perspectives on gender in world literature”, as well as giving the talk “Un-othering ‘trauma’ through Arabic fiction”.

Dr Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS Paris)

Dr Laetitia Zecchini is a researcher at CNRS Paris. She works on contemporary Indian poetry, with a special focus on the “Bombay poets” as well as studying the politics of literature/art, modernisms in India, postcolonial criticism and questions of cosmopolitanism, translation and world literatures.

Zecchini discussed the struggle for cultural freedom and the poetics and politics of Cold War Bombay at the Postcolonial Print Cultures Conference. You can listen to the podcast here.

Professor Nick Harrison

Nick Harrison is Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at King’s College London. He recently published Our Civilizing Mission:The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool University Press: 2019), an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of the ‘humanities’.

Harrison led a seminar for the MULOSIGE project on Teaching in a time of crisis: colonial education and the world of literature.

Professor Galin Tihanov (QMUL)

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at QMUL. He is the author of five books, (co)editor of ten volumes of scholarly essays, and his current research focuses on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile. His most recent book is “The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond” (Stanford UP, 2019); he is currently writing “Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction” for Oxford UP.

Tihanov discussed the place of the English language in a roundtable with reference to Aamir Mufti’s book Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures.

Dr Katherine Hennessey (QMUL)

Dr Katherine Hennessey is a Research Fellow with the Global Shakespeare programme at the University of Warwick and Queen Mary University of London (2014-16), and a Moore Institute Visiting Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway (late 2016). From 2009 to 2014 she lived in Sana’a, Yemen, researching contemporary Yemeni theatre.

She discussed her work on Shakespeare in Yemen with the MULOSIGE project in a special seminar.

Professor Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Venkat Mani is Professor, Department of German and faculty affiliate, DAAD Center for German and European Studies, Global Studies, Center for South Asia, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture, world literature in translation, migration in the German and European context, book and digital cultural histories, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism.

In this MULOSIGE podcast on Bibliomigrancy Professor Mani draws on his book Recoding World Literature to politicise the idea of world literature

Yasmine Seale

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator from Arabic and French, currently living in Istanbul. Her translation of Aladdin was published in 2018 by W. W. Norton. She is working on a new translation of the Thousand and One Nights for the same publisher.

MULOSIGE hosted a workshop with Seale and Robin Moger on Collaboration, Experiment and Voice in Translation.

Professor Marina Warner

Professor Marina Warner is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015. Since 2016, she has been working on the theme of Sanctuary and culture in times of dislocation and diaspora, developing the international Stories in Transit project, which aspires to work with displaced individuals, whatever their status, asking: “What role can imaginary narratives play in contemporary conditions?” and “Can make-believe help make-truth?”

Warner and Wen-chin Ouyang mediated  a workshop with Moger and Yasmine Seale on Collaboration, Experiment and Voice in Translation.

Professor Levi Thompson

Levi Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published in Transnational Literature, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation, (eds. Sameh F. Hanna, Hanem El-Farahaty and Abdel Wahab Khalifa) and Persian Literatures as World Literature, Literatures as World Literature (ed. Thomas Oliver Beebee).

He gave the talk “Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping East-East Exchanges Between Arabic and Persian Poetry” as part of the MULOSIGE project, as well as contributing a guided reading list for our Syllabi.

Professor James Procter (NCL)

Professor James Procter is Director of Research for the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He studies overarching interest is in how literary and cultural production in Britain since the 1940s handles the period in which its empire comes home to roost.

Procter spoke on a roundtable at the Postcolonial Print Cultures Conference, noting that the conference invited us to think not only about significant geographies, but also temporalities. This returns to his own work on radio (the BBC’s Caribbean Voices series and its archives) and the anticipated death of print.

Emad El-Din Aysha

Emad El-Din Aysha is a bilingual (English, Arabic) academic, journalist, translator and aspiring author currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. He was born in the United Kingdom (1974) to Arab parents and attained his PhD in International Studies at the University of Sheffield (2001), having completed his MA and BA at the same institution. He has taught at the American University in Cairo and British University in Egypt and has written for The Egyptian Gazette, Mada Masr, Cairo Scene, and Daily News Egypt. He is now a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF) and has published academic and newspaper articles on SF. His main sci-fi claims to fame are: “The Cymbals of Progress” (Dark Helix Press, Trump: Utopia or Dystopia anthology); “Lambs of the Desert” in R.N. Stephenson’s The Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Volume IV; and “Better Late than Never: The Transmutations of Egyptian SF in the Work of Hosam El-Zembely” in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction.

He contributed to the MULOSIGE Syllabus Science, Literature and Development in the MENA region with Zahra Jannessari-Ladani and Jörg Matthias Determann.

Professor Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine)

Professor Virginia Jackson is Chair of Rhetoric and Critical Theory in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), which won the Christian Gauss Prize and the MLA Prize for a First Book. Her next book, Before Modernism: The Invention of American Poetry is forthcoming from Princeton UP. In her current project, she is thinking about versions of nineteenth-century America in the work of a few contemporary black poets in the US. She is one of the founding members of the Historical Poetics working group.

Jackson spoke at the LINKS event Lyric Orientalism and and the Invention of World Poetry.

Assistant Professor Roanne Kantor (Stanford)

Roanne Kantor is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.  Her primary field is Global Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South Her book project, Even If You Gain the World, focuses on a century of encounters between Latin American and South Asian authors writing in English, Spanish, Hindi and Urdu, and its impact on the state of global Anglophone literature in the present. Recent scholarship appears in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Culture in the Luso-Hispanic World. An article based on this talk will be published in Comparative Literature in 2018. Kantor is also the translator of Juan Jose Saer’s The One Before (2015) and the winner of the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. Kantor has taught at Boston University, Brandeis University, and the University of Texas, Austin, where she earned her MA and PhD.

Kantor gave the talk A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary “Booms” in a Comparative Perspective, excerpts of which can be read here. You can listen to Kantor’s talk via the MULOSIGE podcast series. 

Dr Thomas Langley (KCL)

Dr Thomas Langley is a Lecturer in Comparative and English Literature at King’s College London. His research is interested in thinking about Italy as a postcolonial entity, and particularly in relationships between literary anti-Fascisms and literary anti-colonialisms in Italy and India in the twentieth century.

Langley gave a seminar about Antonio Gramsci’s Anti-colonial Imagination for the MULOSIGE project. You can listen to the podcast from the talk here.

Associate Professor Hala Halim (NYU)

Hala Halim is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. She is the author of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (Fordham University Press, 2013), which received an Honorable Mention from the American Comparative Literature Association for the Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book in Comparative Literature. Her translation of a novel by Mohamed El-Bisatie, Clamor of the Lake, won an Egyptian State Incentive Award.

Halim gave a talk titled “Lotus Journal: Translating along the Afro-Asian Hyphen” for the MULOSIGE project. Her presentation drew on her previous publications on Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings. These are the 2012 article “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the 2017 essay “Afro-Asian Third-Worldism into Global South: The Case of Lotus Journal” in the digital scholarship project Global South Studies. The presentation asked – among other things – what conjunctions between editing and translating might we discern in the endeavour to anthologize Afro-Asian literature, and how do they come to inflect our understanding of the notion of the “canon”?

Professor Pablo Mukherjee (Warwick)

Professor Pablo Mukherjee teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program at the University of Warwick. Among Professor Mukherjee’s recently completed projects are the books  Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire:Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan: 2013) and Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (Liverpool University Press: forthcoming 2019).

Mukherjee gave the lecture Famines, Governance and (Post-) colonial literatures: an eco-critical perspective on Rudyard Kipling and Mahasweta Devi” for the MULOSIGE project, discussing how mass disaster events such as famines, epidemics, and floods are not exceptional, but define the ‘normal’ everyday life-world of the modern colonial and post-colonial societies.

Professor Ronit Ricci (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Professor Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures and Associate Professor in the departments of Asian studies and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. Her interests include translation studies, Javanese and Malay literature, multilingual manuscripts, the history and literary culture of the Sri Lankan Malays, and scripts. She is the author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago, 2011), co-editor of Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories (St. Jerome, 2011), and editor of Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (University of Hawaii, 2016).

Ricci led a discussion of essays relating to Multilingual Sri Lanka I: Itineraries