Ayman A. El-Desouky

Ayman A. El-Desouky is an Egyptian academic and the Founding Chair of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS, 2009-2012) at SOAS, University of London, where he has been lecturing on Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature since 2002. He is also co-founder of a pioneering programme in Global English Literary Studies (launched 2014). El-Desouky has lectured on World Literature and American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin (1993-1995), on Arabic Language and Literature at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University (1995-1996), where he founded a new programme in Arabic Language and Literature, and at Harvard University (1996-2002). He is a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). He has lectured widely on hermeneutics, comparative literature and literary theory in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East.

His most recent publications include: The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Between Hermeneutic Provenance and Textuality: The Qur’an and the Question of Method in Approaches to World Literature, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 16.3 (2014); and Heterologies of Revolutionary Action: On Historical Consciousness and the Sacred in Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.4 (September 2011). He is currently preparing a long monograph on Figuring the Sacred in the Modern Arabic Novel for Edinburgh University Press.