Brian Edwards

  Associate Professor of English,
  Comparative Literary Studies,
  and American Studies
  Director of Graduate 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, globalization and culture, and contemporary literary and cultural production of North Africa and the Middle East.  His fields of interest include American studies, Middle East and North African studies, comparative literature, cultural and diaspora studies, colonial and postcolonial discourse, globalization studies, film, and cultural anthropology.

Edwards has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad, including in Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia.  In winter 2007 and winter 2009, he was visiting faculty at University of Tehran’s Institute for North American Studies; in spring 2007 and spring 2010, he was visiting faculty at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. During 2008-09, he pursued training in sociocultural anthropology and Middle East studies at the University of Chicago, as well as advanced Arabic and Persian, as a recipient of a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  In the spring of 2009, he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Cairo University, Giza, where he lectured and consulted on the development of American Studies programs. In spring 2011, he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Italy at the Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale". He is a former Fulbright Fellow to Morocco and an active member of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Center at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, Morocco. In 2005, he was named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. (Click here to read a Carnegie profile of his scholarship. Downloads 72kb pdf file.)

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.  The most recent such event (the fourth in the series) was held on May 19-20, 2011.  Click here for more details. 

Edwards also is co-chair of Northwestern’s Middle East and North African studies working group (MENA), which has as its goal the reconsideration of this field on intellectual and programmatic grounds after the critique of area studies.   In spring 2010, the MENA group hosted a major symposium on “New Directions in MENA Studies,” the first of a series; the group is also active in helping to develop MENA studies at Northwestern during a period of unprecedented growth.   In addition to serving in the English department, Edwards is a core faculty member in Northwestern’s programs of Comparative Literary Studies, American Studies, and the Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture.

His first book, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, was published by Duke University Press in 2005.  In November 2010, Globalizing American Studies, which he co-edited with Dilip Gaonkar, was published by the University of Chicago Press. He has also published essays on Henry James, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Alfred Hitchcock, Frantz Fanon, Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies, contemporary Moroccan cinema, American Studies in Iran, and other topics. His creative non-fiction appears in literary journals such as The Believer, McSweeney’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, and A Public Space. (See below for bibliography and links.)

Edwards is working on two new book projects.  The first, entitled After the American Century, examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in contemporary 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, collaborative research teams, and an interactive website, and includes close readings of contemporary Moroccan, Egyptian, and Iranian literature, film, graphic novels, and popular culture.  The second, which emerges from his literary non-fiction, is an account of his experiences in North Africa and the Middle East during a crucial decade (2001-2011).  This was the decade when ideas about the region, already infected with deep strains of misunderstanding and stereotype, metastasized.

Publications by Brian T. Edwards

Works in Progress

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

Untitled (book project)

In Press

"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 December 2011.

"Islam," in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2nd edition, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: NYU Press).  Forthcoming 2012.

 

Essays & Articles

"Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,"  Public Culture 23.3 (fall 2011): 493-504.  Click here to read the essay.

"Logics and Contexts of Circulation," in A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 454-472.  

"After the American Century," REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 27. Special issue: "States of Emergency - States of Crisis" ed. by Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald Pease and Christoph Raetzschl. (Tuebingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2011): 57-72.

Review of Valerie Orlando, Francophone Voices of the ‘New’ Morocco in Film and Print, Journal of North African Studies, 16.3 (2011): 493-496.

"The Moroccan Paul Bowles," Michigan Quarterly Review 50.2 (Spring 2011): 191-209. 
Click here to read the essay. (Downloads 1.2 mb pdf file)

"Al Magharbah yahibun malikihum wa baladihum" (in Arabic), Maghrib al-Youm (Morocco), 18-24 February 2011, p. 19. 
Click here to read the article. (Downloads 86 kb pdf file).

"The Next to Tumble?" an Op-Ed on Morocco in the wake of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, Chicago Tribune, 10 February 2011.

Click here to read the article.

"You Had to Be There," A Public Space, issue 11 (Fall 2010), 11-12.  A mini-essay on jokes in Tehran, Cairo, Fez, and Casablanca.  Includes three jokes, suitable for retelling.

Click here to read the essay. (Downloads 2.4 mb pdf file of entire "If You See Something, Say Something" section on laughter and humor)

"Globalizing American Studies" (with Dilip Gaonkar), an extended introductory essay to Globalizing American Studies, edited by B.T. Edwards and D. P. Gaonkar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp 1-44.

"American Studies in Motion: Tehran, Hyderabad, Cairo," epilogue to Globalizing American Studies, edited by B.T. Edwards and D. P. Gaonkar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp 300-321.

Review of Susan Nance, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935, Journal of American History, 97.2 (September 2010): 555-556.

"Fragments of America: Response to Marius Jucan,"  American, British and Canadian Studies (Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania), vol. 14 (June 2010): 96-103.

Click here to read the essay. (Downloads 176kb pdf file.)

"Letter from Cairo," McSweeney's,  issue 34 (Spring 2010), 16-18. A 1,200 word mini-essay about coffee-fasting during Ramadan, feeling like a speck, and a shared sense of community.

Click here to read the essay. (Downloads 52 kb pdf file.)

"Disorienting Captivity: A Response to Gordon Sayre" American Literary History 22.2 (Summer 2010): 360-367. Jointly published in Early American Literature.

Click here to read the essay.

Review of Sandra Gayle Carter, What Moroccan Cinema?: A Historical and Critical Study, 1956-2006, The Middle East Journal, vol. 64, no. 3 (Summer 2010), 490-491.

"Watching Shrek in Tehran," an essay on illegal ogres, immoral materials, Iranian film in its U.S. circulation and Hollywood film in Iranian circulation. The Believer, vol. 8, no. 3 (March/April 2010): 5-11.

Click here to read the essay.

"Cairo 2010: After Kefaya," Introduction to Cairo Portfolio, A Public Space, issue 9 (Fall 2009): 128-33.
Click here to read the essay.

Review of Gil Hochberg's In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of the Separatist Imagination, Comparative Literature 60.2 (Spring 2009).

"Arab Ambivalence toward Obama and the Race Card," The Huffington Post, 26 November 2008.
Click here to read the article.

"We're already talking to Tehran," an Op-Ed on Obama and dialogue with Iran, Chicago Tribune (Sunday), 20 July 2008.
Click here to read the article.

"Kiddie Orientalism," an essay on Star Wars, North Africa, and the first post-9/11 generation of American children. The Believer, no. 54 (June 2008), 21-30.
Click here to read the essay.

"American Studies in Tehran," Public Culture 19.3 (2007): 415-24.
Click here to read the essay.
Selected as a "Notable Essay of 2007" in The Best American Essays 2008,Adam Gopnik, Guest Editor, Robert Atwan, Series Editor (Houghton Mifflin 2008).

"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.
Reprinted in North African Cinema in Global Context: Through the Lens of Diaspora, ed. Andrea Khalil (Routledge, 2008).

"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 essay.

"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." Click here to read the essay.

"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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