I am a scholar of Arabic literature and visual culture. My research explores the political and aesthetic potentials of the poetic image (al-ṣūra al-shi‘riyya) across a highly intertextual Arabic poetic tradition that constantly negotiates between continuity and transformation. In particular, I examine the precarious relationship between words and images engendered through the use of rhetorical devices such as metaphor (al-isti‘āra), investigating how the act of making visible certain concepts, bodies, and objects—thereby drawing attention to that which is invisible—uncovers an alternative way of knowing and relating to the world and destabilizes presumed historical narratives. I trace how visual epistemologies can hold radical potentials for the imagination (al-khayāl) and for social movements, often leading to their suppression and containment.
In thinking through these questions, my current book project engages classical discourses on image-making (taṣwīr) in tenth- and eleventh-century Arabic poetics and criticism as well as twentieth-century discourses on cultural and poetic modernisms in order to theorize that language in the service of taṣwīr is at the heart of modernist Arabic poetic movements and projects.
My interest in poetic visuality and taṣwīr extends beyond the conceptual image to literary genres that incorporate pictorial elements, including Arabic graphic narratives, film, illustrated literary magazines and journals as well as other intermedial ephemera. Such wide-ranging materials are built into my teaching, which covers major themes and trends across Arabic literature. These include thematic transformations in the qaṣīda’s form, the rise of the Arabic novel and short story and their entanglements with translation movements and premodern styles of prose writing, transhistorical questions on exile and belonging, as well as the role of Arab women and queer writers/activists in shaping literary culture.
I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University, an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut, and a BA in English Literature with a diploma in Media Studies and Journalism from the American University of Beirut.
Before coming to the University of California, Berkeley, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown where I taught courses on the embodiments of the image in modern Arabic poetry and on representations of the environment in modern Arabic prose and poetry. Before embarking on my doctoral studies, I served as an instructor of record in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut where I taught courses in translation studies and world literature.
Select Publications
al-Shābbī, Abū al-Qāsim. “On the Arab Poetic Imagination and Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī’s Controversial Polemics.” Translation and critical introduction. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 141.2 (2026): 210–16.
“At the Margins of Beirut’s Cultural Modernism: Aesthetics and Politics in the Inter-Artistic Works of Laure Ghorayeb.” On the Margins of Shi‘r: Rethinking Histories of Poetic Modernism in the Twentieth-Century Arab World, eds Adey Almohsen & Hamad al-Rayes. Middle Eastern Literatures (2024): 1–26.
"The Arab Woman and the Palestine Cause at the Eastern Women’s Conference in Cairo, 1938" in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Empires in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1860-2015, eds Beth Baron, Secil Yilmaz & Nova Robinson. Part of the “Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820” database, eds Kathryn Kish Sklar & Thomas Dublin. Binghamton, NY: Alexander Street Press, July 2020.
“The Complications of Reading Egypt as Africa: Translation and Magdy el-Shafee’s ﻣﺘﺮو (Metro),” co-authored with James Hodapp. African Literature Today 35: Focus on Egypt, ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. Boydell & Brewer (2017): 22–38.
“Gendered Voices of Youth and Taḥrīr in Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution.” Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research 2.2 (2016): 228–44.
Research Interests
Modern and premodern Arabic literature, Islamic traditions of image-making, taṣwīr, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, Arabic modernism, inter-arts theory, Arab modernism, takhyīl, metaphor, translation theory and practice, world literature, Arab feminist literature.
