Brian T. Edwards
Brian T. Edwards teaches literature and cultural studies at Northwestern University, where he is Director of Graduate Studies of English and co-Chair of the Middle East and North African Studies working group. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (2005) and co-editor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of Globalizing American Studies (2010). In 2009, he edited a portfolio of work by the next generation of Cairo-based writers for the New York literary journal A Public Space. His new book project, “After the American Century,” examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in North Africa and the Middle East, with particular focus on three cities – Fez, Cairo, and Tehran – in order to make an argument about the circulation of culture in the digital age counter to prevailing notions in both literary studies and public and cultural diplomacy. The project involves fieldwork and collaborative research, and includes close readings of contemporary Moroccan, Egyptian, and Iranian literature, film, graphic novels, and popular culture. He has received major grants from the Carnegie Corporation of NY (Carnegie Scholar) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation (New Directions Fellow). Since 2007, he has been visiting faculty at the University of Tehran, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and, as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, at Cairo University, and the Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale," Italy.
Selected Publications
- "Logics and Contexts of Circulation," in A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011). Forthcoming.
- "Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Non-return in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train," in The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel (NY: Oxford University Press, 2011). Forthcoming.
- "The Moroccan Paul Bowles", Michigan Quarterly Review 50.2 (Spring 2011): 191-209.
- Globalizing American Studies, ed. by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip P. Gaonkar (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 344 pp.
- "American Studies in Motion: Tehran, Hyderabad, Cairo," in Globalizing American Studies, ed. Edwards and Gaonkar (University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp 300-321.
- “Watching Shrek in Tehran”, The Believer, vol. 8, no. 3 (March/April 2010): 5-11.
- "Cairo 2010: After Kefaya", ed. and intro. by Brian T. Edwards, A Public Space, Issue 9 (Fall 2009): 127-175.
- “Kiddie Orientalism”, The Believer, no. 54 (June 2008), 21-30.
- “American Studies in Tehran," Public Culture 19.3 (2007): 415-24.
- "Marock in Morocco: Reading Moroccan Films in the Age of Circulation, ". Journal of North African Studies 12.3 (2007): 287-307. Special issue on North African cinema.
- Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, New Americanists Series (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 368 pp.
- "Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations," American Literary History 17.2 (Summer 2005), 307-34.
- "Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 23.1&2 (2003): 70-86. Special issue: "Comparative (Post)colonialisms."
- "Fanon's al-Jaza'ir, or Algeria translated", Parallax 8.2 (April-June 2002): 99-115.
Are you Brian T. Edwards? Click here to update your profile.