Dr Mohamed-Salah Omri
Dr Mohamed-Salah Omri
Tutorial Fellow in Modern Arabic
Email: Dr Mohamed-Salah Omri
Teaching Interests
I teach modern Arabic literature (1800 to the present). My lectures and seminars include surveys of the subject as well in-depth study in the form of special and further subjects. I am also the College’s tutor for Oriental studies students. Most of my teaching is at the Oriental Institute where I am Lecturer in Modern Arabic Language and Literature.
Research Interests
My key research interests include modern Arabic literature, Francophone literature of the Maghreb, Comparative and world Literatures, literature and history. I have particular interest in issues of narrative form, cultural politics and literature and knowledge. My main research publications pertain to Arabic fiction in its relation to its own past and to Western literatures. In addition to focussed essays, I published a study on the writer al-Mas’adi from a comparative perspective Nationalism, Islam and World Literature: sites of confluence in the writings of Mahmud al-Mas’adi (Routledge, 2006) and edited The Novelization of Islamic Literatures: the intersections of Western, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish Traditions (2007). I also tend to work on the intersections between history and literature, which resulted in co-editing a book with historians Maria Fusaro and Colin Heywood, titled Trade and cultural exchange in the early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s maritime legacy (2010) and two books (2002 and 2003) in collaboration with Fondation Temimi in Tunisia.
Other Information
I grew up in Tunisia where I obtained a BA from the University of Tunis. My MA and PhD in comparative literature were completed at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining the University of Oxford, I was Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis in the US and, prior to that, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Mediterranean Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain.
