Brian Edwards

Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literary Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies

University Hall Room 319
Telephone: (847) 491-4718
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: bedwards@northwestern.edu

Brian T. Edwards (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches and writes about U.S. literature and culture in its international context. His fields of interest include American studies, comparative literature, cultural and diaspora studies, colonial and postcolonial discourse, film, and globalization. A former Fulbright Fellow to Morocco, he also specializes in Maghrebi literature and culture, especially in its intersections with U.S. culture and politics. He has taught courses on such topics as comparative orientalisms, cold war culture, representations of World War II, globalization, circulation, and diaspora, and is a core faculty member in the Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture.

Edwards has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad, including in Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. In winter 2007, he was visiting faculty at University of Tehran’s Institute for North American Studies; in spring 2007, he was visiting faculty at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

His first book, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, was published by Duke University Press in 2005. Edwards has also published essays on Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Frantz Fanon, Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies, contemporary Moroccan cinema, American Studies in Iran, and other topics.

Edwards directs the Globalizing American Studies Project, a multi-year initiative with the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern, which features a series of annual symposia and an international network of scholars. With Dilip Gaonkar, he is editing a collection of essays from this project (forthcoming in 2009). In May 2007, he launched a similar initiative on Middle Eastern Media. Edwards also is co-convener of a Middle East and North African Studies Working Group at Northwestern which has as its goal the reconsideration of this field on intellectual and programmatic grounds after the critique of area studies.

Edwards’s new book project is entitled “After the American Century.” It examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in contemporary North Africa and the Middle East. The project involves field work, research teams, and an interactive website. In 2005, he was named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of N.Y. for this work.

Selected Publications by Brian T. Edwards

Books

Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, New Americanists Series (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005).

Works in Progress

After the American Century: American Culture in Middle Eastern Circulation (book project)

Globalizing American Studies, edited by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip P. Gaonkar, forthcoming in late 2008/early 2009. Contributors include Kate A. Baldwin, Ali Behdad, Wai Chee Dimock, Brent Hayes Edwards, Brian Larkin, Claudio Lomnitz, Donald Pease, Naoki Sakai, Elizabeth Thompson, and Kariann Yokota.

“American Studies in Motion: Hyderabad, Tehran, Cairo” (essay)

“Shrek in the suq : Rethinking public diplomacy ‘from the native's point of view,'” for an edited collection on Public Diplomacy

Articles

"Kiddie Orientalism," a 7000-word essay on Star Wars, North Africa, and the first post-9/11 generation of American children. Forthcoming in The Believer, no. 54 (June 2008).

"American Studies in Tehran," Public Culture 19.3 (2007): 415-24.
Click here to read the article.

“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.

“Rethinking American Orientalism After the American Century,” America in the Middle East: The Middle East in America , ed. Patrick McGreevy (Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut, 2006), 41-52.

"On the Role of Intelligence in Globalization: Phases of Mrabet's Work," Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal , no. 3 (2006), 9-18. Special issue: "Mohammed Mrabet and Paul Bowles: Literary and Cultural Encounters."

“Following Casablanca: Recasting the Postcolonial City,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 5.1 (2005): 13-20. Special issue: “African Cities.”

"Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations," American Literary History 17.2 (Summer 2005), 307-34.

"The Worlds of Paul Bowles," Tingis: A Moroccan-American Magazine of Ideas and Culture 2.2 (Spring 2005), 14-22. Click here to read article.

"The Maghreb in Black and White," Foreign Policy, no. 146 (January/February 2005):90-91 [Translated into Spanish and Arabic for FP Spain and FP Arabic]

"What Happened in Tangier?" Introduction to Moroccan republication of Love with a Few Hairs (1967), by Mohammed Mrabet, translated by Paul Bowles (Fez: Moroccan Cultural Studies Center, 2004): i-xiv. [Arabic translation by Abdelaziz Jadir for Arabic edition of Love with a Few Hairs in preparation]

"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."

"The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems," in The Age of Innocence (Norton Critical Edition), ed. Candace Waid (NY: W.W. Norton, 2003), 482-506.

"Fanon's al-Jaza'ir, or Algeria translated", Parallax 8.2 (April-June 2002): 99-115.

"Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism", Film & History 31.2 (2001): 13-24.

"Review of Jarrod Hayes' Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb", The Journal of North African Studies 5.2 (2000): 94-98.

"Desert of Memory", FEED Magazine, 20 October 2000.

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