William Granara

William Granara

Research Professor of the Practice of Arabic on the Gordon Gray Endowment
William Granara

William Granara is Research Professor of the Practice of Arabic on the Gordon Gray Endowment. He is also the founding director of Harvard Summer School’s Program "Postcolonial Studies: France and the Arab World," in Aix-en-Provence, France. He studied Arabic and French at Georgetown University, and received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former executive director of the Center for Arabic Study at the American University in Cairo and the former director of the Arabic Field School of the U.S. Department of State in Tunis, Tunisia. He travels and researches extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Professor Granara specializes in the literature and history of the Arab Mediterranean in both the medieval and modern periods. He writes extensively on Muslim Sicily, and has published numerous articles on the poetry of Ibn Hamdis, Sicily's most celebrated Arab poet.

In addition, he lectures and writes on contemporary Arabic literature and has published translations of Egyptian and North African fiction. His translation into English of the Algerian Arabic novel The Earthquake was published in March 2000, and the Egyptian novel Granada in 2004. His work on literary criticism focuses on postcolonialism and cross-cultural poetics. His articles include: “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism, and the Andalusian Chronotope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel (2005); “Nile Crossings: Hospitality and Revenge in Egyptian Rural Narratives (2010); and “Contesting the Mediterranean in Colonial North African Literature” (in press).

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