Star Speakers
We are excited to announce that we already have three confirmed star speakers who will be participating. Below are their names listed alphabetically by family name. Click on each name to view the speaker’s professional page, and click on the title of their abstract to read more about their presentation.
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Omaima Abou-Bakr
Talk Title: Reflections on Sufi Poetics and Aesthetic Sensibility: Ta'wil as Method and Vision. Omaima Abou-Bakr is a Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Cairo University; a founding member of “The Women and Memory Forum” in Egypt; a researcher/member of the “Musawah” Knowledge Building Team. She specialized in medieval Sufi poetry and comparative topics in medieval English and Arabic literature. Her scholarly interests also include women’s mysticism and female spirituality in Christianity and Islam, feminist theology, Muslim women’s history, and gender issues in Islamic discourses and Qur’anic interpretation. She has published articles in both English and Arabic on poetry and medieval literary texts, on historical representations of women in pre-modern Muslim societies, women and gender in religious discourses, Islamic feminist issues, and Qur’anic tafsir. Her most recent work in Arabic is a WMF publication, an edited volume: Qira’at niswiyyah fi al-tarikh al-thaqafi al-‘arabi (Feminist Readings in Arab Cultural History, 2024). 
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Albrecht Classen
Talk title: Medieval Verse Narratives as Psychological Lenses into the Human Heart (Online) Dr. Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona, focusing on medieval and early modern literature, culture, the arts, and history. He has published currently 135 books and 848 articles. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities, and he serves on the boards of many other journals. Among his various awards, he was knighted by the Duke of Swabia in 2017, and in 2004, the German government bestowed its Medal of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz), the highest civilian award.
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Magda Mansour Hasabelnaby
(In-Person) Professor: Faculty of Women, Ain Shams University Cairo, Egypt Talk Title: Psychological Stability and Social Accountability in the Qur’an: A Hermeneutic Inquiry Magda Mansour Hasabelnaby is a Professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University, Faculty of Women, where she teaches comparative and contemporary US literature. Her publications in both English and Arabic include articles on African and Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, Arab and Muslim women writers, and postcolonial readings of contemporary poetry and fiction. She has presented her research papers in various conferences held in England, Poland, and the USA, including ACLA 2014 and 2017. In addition, she has visited a number of universities in the USA to give lectures on teaching literature and on Arabic and Arab-American literature. These universities included Miami, Florida; NEIU, Chicago; the University of Oregon, Eugene; and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Professor Hasabelnaby is a literary translator; she has published a number of translations of American poetry into Arabic, in addition to the translation of a novel, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 2010 by Dar Alshorouq. |
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Feroza Jussawalla
(Online) Professor Emerita, British and Irish Literary Studies, University of New Mexico, USA Talk title: Growing up in the Diaspora: the Psychology of the Hybridized Character Dr. Feroza Jussawalla is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English, (Peter Lang,1984), She has edited , Conversations with V.S. Naipaul,1997 (University Press of Mississippi) and co –edited Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World,1992 (University Press of Mississippi), Emerging South Asian Women’s Writing, (Peter Lang, 2017), Memory, Voice and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East, (Routledge, 2020), Muslim Women’s Writing from South and South East Asia, (Routledge, 2021). Her collection of poems Chiffon Saris(2002) published by Kolkotta, Writer’s Workshop and Toronto South of Asian Review.
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Eid Mohamed
(In-Person) Assistant Professor: Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University Talk Title: Unlearning the Archive: Digital Humanities, Postcolonial Identity, and the Representation of the Self in al-Risāla and al-Manār Magazines. Eid Mohamed (PhD in US-Middle East cultural encounters, George Washington University, USA) is an assistant professor at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at the College of Arts and Sciences at Qatar University. Mohamed's work is located at the crossroads of several areas of inquiry in US-Middle encounters in literary and cultural studies. His publications include a sole-authored book on the role of Egyptian cultural and literary producers in mediating critiques of the US power and how one can historicize the Egyptian responses to power as well as the hopes and despairs of the Obama presidency and the Arab Spring (Arab Occidentalism, I.B. Tauris, 2015; and a new paperback edition in 2017). Mohamed has published several articles in academic journals, including Journal of Cultural Analytics, Journal of Digital Scholarship in Humanities, New Media and Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. 
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Carmen Nocentelli
(Online) Professor, Comparative Literature, British and Irish Literary Studies, University of New Mexico, USA Talk title: Love in the Age of Expansion: The Imperial Origins of Modern Marriage Professor Nocentelli is an early modern specialist with an interest in the transformations brought about by Europe’s overseas expansion—what has come to be called “the global Renaissance”—Nocentelli pursues a research agenda crossing both disciplinary and territorial borders. She teaches and writes not only about European literatures and cultures, but also about the ways that these literatures and cultures were transformed by cross-cultural encounters in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. She is the editor (with Su Fang Ng) of England’s Asian Renaissance (2021) and the author of Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (2013) which won the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and the 2014 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in Literature by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
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Heba M. Sharobeem
(In-Person) Professor: English Department at Alexandria University Alexandria, Egypt Talk Title: Pedagogy & Psychology in Egyptian High Education Heba M. Sharobeem is a senator, member of the Committee of Education, Scientific Research and Technology at the Egyptian Senate, and member of the Committee of Education at the National Council of Women. She is also a professor of modern British and American Literature and the former chair of the English Department at the Faculty of Education/ Alexandria University, Egypt. Her research interests fall broadly within the fields of feminist, post-colonial cross -cultural studies, and comparative literature. She has given presentations in all these fields in different conferences in Egypt and abroad, including America, Russia, England, Scotland, Morocco, and India. She is also a teacher trainer with a keen interest in civic education. She has published research papers and articles in various journals and magazines in Egypt and abroad, and contributed with a chapter and various pieces of writing and translations in two books, Women Writing Africa and Joke and Performance in Africa. She is a member of the Editorial Board team in two International Journals. |
