Clarissa Burt
كالرسا برت

Associate Professor of Arabic Language, Literature and Culture at the U.S. Naval Academy, received her PhD from University of Chicago, lived and taught in Cairo for several years, and has been at USNA for the last nineteen. Her research interests include Arabic poetry, in Fuṣḥā and in colloquial, Arabic performance genres and media, and the functionality of the Arabic cultural canon in the diachronic (re)production of Arab identities.

Annapolis, MD
burt@usna.edu 

كالرسا برت أستاذة مشاركة متخصصة في اللغة العربية وآدابها وثقافتها في األكاديمية البحرية األمريكية حصلت على الدكتوراه من جامعة شيكاغو وعاشت ود ًرست في القاهرة عدة سنوات قبل تعيينها في منصبها الحالي منذ ١٩ سنة. وتشمل اهتماماتها البحثية الشعر العربي بالفصحى والعامية ودور الشعر وتأثيره في أنواع فنون األداء ووظيفية التراث العربي الثقافي في إعادة إنتاج الهويات العربية عبر العصور والعهود المختلفة

Johan Weststeijn
يوهان وستستين

received his PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of Amsterdam. He analyzes the parallels between stories from the Bible, Greek myth, and Arabic literature. He is the author of a number of Dutch publications on the Basūs War and the story of al-Zīr in modern Arab art, theater, and politics. His current research focuses on parallels between the story of the Basūs War and works from other literatures, not only the story of the Trojan War but also Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mérimée’s Colomba.
https://uva.academia.edu/JohanWeststeijn

Amsterdam, NL
j.k.weststeijn@gmail.com

يوهان وستستين حصل على الدكتوراه في الدراسات العربية من جامعة آمستردام وتشمل اهتماماته تحليل العالقات المقارنة بين سيرة الزير سالم وبين األساطير اليونانية

Raphael Cormack
رفائيل كورماك

Obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 with a thesis called Oedipus on the Nile: Translations and Adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos in Egypt,1900-1970 . Cormack lived in Cairo for several years and his writing on Arabic literature, culture and history has appeared in the London Review of Books, Prospect, TLS, and Apollo Magazine, among others. He is the author of Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s (London: Saqi, 2021). 

Abdel Kareem El Hegrwe
عبدال كريم إل هجرو

  (b. September 1, 1991) obtained his PhD in Theater Criticism from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Arabic Language in 2021 with the distinction summa cum laude . His PhD thesis was published by Battana Publishing in Cairo in 2022. In addition to a number of scholarly articles on Arabic literature, he published a collection of short stories, and wrote two plays and a novel. He is working on an Encyclopedia (Annotated Bibliography) of Arabic Plays that are based on the Folk Epics from the period 1847-2021. 

Sayed Ali Esmail
سيد علي إسماعيل

Has been dubbed ‘the Jabartī of Arabic Theater’! He is Professor of Arabic Theater at the Department of Arabic Language, Faculty of Arts, Helwan University. He has been seconded to work at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Kuwait, at United Arab Emirates University and at Qatar University. In 2018, he gave lectures on Arabic theater and its history to students of the Department of Arabic Language at Jagiellonian University, Poland. He has published forty-four academic books on Arabic theater in Egypt and the other Arab countries, among them Tārīkh al-masraḥ fī al-ʿālim al-ʿarabī fī al-qarn al-tāsiʿ ʿashr (The History of Theater in the Arab World in the Nineteenth Century), sixty peer-reviewed scholarly articles and more than a thousand contributions to Egyptian and Arabic newspapers.

Peter Webb
بيتر ويب

is a university lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. He studied Arabic at SOAS, University of London and at the University of Damascus. He then qualified as a solicitor in the insolvency and restructuring law practice in London before returning to academia and a PhD at SOAS in Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East. His research investigates the evolution of Arab identity and Muslim narratives of pre-Islamic history as developed in pre-modern Middle Eastern writings. Peter is the author of Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh, 2016). 

Alexander Key
الكسندر كي

is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature with interests ranging across the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from the seventh century onwards. His 2018 monograph, Language Between God and the Poets (UC Press, open access), explains Classical Arabic theories about poetry and philosophy to all who are interested in how language produces affect and reflects the world. He is currently working on an under-contract edition and translation of al-Jurjānī’s Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz for the Library of Arabic Literature. 

Wael Khattab
وائل خطاب

received his PhD in Islamic Art and Architecture from the Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University. He is currently Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Culture at the Defense Language Institute (California). Among his various publications is a monograph on the influence of Islamic architecture on American architecture.

Pamela Klasova
باميلا كلاسوفا

is Assistant Professor of the Classical Mediterranean and Middle East at Macalester College (USA). She works at the intersection of classical Arabic literature, Islamic history, and Late Antiquity. She is currently preparing a book on public speech and oratory under the Umayyad dynasty (661-750) through the case study of its famous governor, al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī. She has published and worked in different fields of Arabic and Islamic studies: oratory, poetry, hadith, and history.
https://macalester.academia.edu/PamelaKlasova 

Daniela Potenza
دانييلا بوتينزا

is a researcher of Arabic Language and Literature at Università degli Studi di Messina (Italy) at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations (DICAM) where she also teaches Arabic Language and Literature. Her research focuses on Modern and Contemporary Egyptian literature, Arabic theater and popular literature with a particular interest in intertextuality. She holds a PhD in Arabic Literature from INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris) and UniOr (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”). Her book, The Kaleidoscope Effect: Rewriting in Alfred Farag’s Plays as a Multifunctional Strategy for a Multi-layered Creation, has been published by IPOCAN (Rome, 2020). She is affiliated to the Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient Méditerranée (CERMOM, INALCO) and she is the secretary of the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO).

Ali Hussein
علي حسين

is an Associate Professor for classical Arabic poetry at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, University of Haifa. He is working in the last few years on the development of the balāgha of Arabic poetry from its early stages in the 5th century C.E. until later Islamic periods (the 15th century). In the last few years, Hussein together with a colleague of his from the Department of Information Systems, the same university, are developing technology for analyzing the balāgha’s development in classical Arabic poetry. In his last ISF-granted research, Hussein is studying the development of humor in this poetry. He has several publications, among them The Lightning-Scene in Ancient Arabic Poetry: Function, Narration, and Idiosyncrasy in Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Poetry (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), in the series Arabische Studien, and The Rhetorical Fabric of the Traditional Arabic Qaṣīda in Its Formative Stages: A Comparative Study of the Rhetoric in Two Traditional Poems by ʿAlqama l-Faḥl and Bashshār b. Burd (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), in the series Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes .