Muhsin al-Musawi (Chair)

Professor Muhsin al-Musawi is a literary critic and Professor of Classical and Modern Arabic Literature, Comparative and Cultural Studies at Columbia University. He served as academic consultant for many academic institutions and taught for over two decades at universities in the Arab world before moving to Columbia University. He is the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature and the recipient of the Owais Award in Literary Criticism in 2002, and also the Kuwait Prize in Arabic language and literature, 2018. He is the author of twenty-eight books (including six novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. His teaching and research interests span several periods and genres. His books include: Scheherazade in England (1981), The Society of the Thousand and One Nights (2000), The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (2009), Anglo-Orient (2000), The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003), Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006), Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006), Islam on the Street: Religion in Arabic Literature (2009), which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010. He is also editor and contributor to Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship (2009) and wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics Edition of The Arabian Nights (2007). His book, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (2015) has been widely acclaimed. He edited Arabic Literature for the Classroom (2017). His forthcoming book (in 2020) is Arabic Disclosures: The Postcolonial Autobiographical Atlas.