The Role of Arabic in Comparative Literature
Description
Since the 1993 Bernheimer report, Comparative Literature as a field has officially taken a stance against its historic Eurocentrism. Likewise in 1993, María Rosa Menocal questioned the foundations of Romance philology by reaching before 1492 to a medieval Mediterranean mix of Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. Today, scholars of the global south regularly appeal to the journal Lotus and its multi-lingual publication in Arabic, French, and English while based out of Cairo as a model of literary circulation beyond the dominant logics of colonial mediation (Hala Halim, 2012 and Anne Garland Mahler, 2018). What is the unique role of Arabic in Comparative Literature as it is practiced as a field in North America, a field that still feels the drag of its Eurocentric base? Given its historic and colonial proximity to Europe, how does Arabic function in our teaching and research within Comparative literature today, now that three decades have passed since the critique of Eurocentrism became mainstream?
This seminar invites participants who aim to think collectively about the specific interventions Arabists can make in the field today given Arabic’s unique positionality, and how these interventions are similar and distinct across time periods. Other questions participants might consider include:
- How can Arabic philology and literary theory challenge Eurocentric conceptual knowledge, past and present?
- How is the study of Arabic hindered by current geopolitics and budgetary cuts to language study?
- What does it mean to theorize with Arabic while in the global north and amidst ongoing wars in the Middle East?
- How does Arabic uniquely find its way into Comparative Literature as a language situated on the borders of Europe?
This seminar welcomes contributions that range from conceptual retrieval from classical Arabic poetics; Arabic in comparative pre-modern contexts with Spanish, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, amongst others; Francophone and Arabophone contrapuntal comparisons; Anglo-Arab literature; modern Middle Eastern literary comparativism (with Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, etc.); Arabic and Afro-Asian conceptions of world literature; and beyond.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hannah is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London and, for 2025-7, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD in 2021 from NYU. Her first monograph, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press; her work has appeared in Alif, Comparative Literature Studies, Comparative Literature, and IJMES, and won the ACLA A. Owen Aldridge Prize.
Speaker Bio
Radwa El Barouni is currently the director and coordinator of the Arabic Language Program at the University of Pennsylvania in the MELC department. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, she previously taught Arabic literature, language and translation at Williams College, Durham University (U.K) and at UT Austin. She received her masters and PhD from the University of Texas, Austin in Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Speaker Bio
Dr Mahmoud Al-Zayed is an Einstein Research Fellow in the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Department of History and Cultural Studies. His current research and teaching focus on the intellectual histories of decolonisation within south-south comparative and relational frameworks, as well as on the histories of Comparative Literature in the Indian and Arab worlds. His most recent publication is Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human: The Poetics of Translating Resistance (Routledge, 2025).
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. My first book project aims to challenge approaches to desire in the Anglophone academy by asking how Islamic romantic epics theorize the relationship between romantic love, familial love, and communal care, and how their theorizations compare with their counterparts in medieval European literature. My work is out or forthcoming in postmedieval, Comparative Literature Studies, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Speaker Bio
Jad Kadan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research lies at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, cultural studies, and Arabic-Islamic thought. He focuses in particular on string metaphors as a defining force in shaping the worldview articulated through Arabic discourse and culture.
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth Benninger received her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and is currently part-time faculty at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU.