Professor Mohamed-Salah Omri

I am the College’s tutor for undergraduate and postgraduate Asian and Middle Eastern Studies students. My main teaching is in modern Arabic literature (1800 to the present). I have a BA in English and Linguistics from the University of Tunis, Tunisia. My MA and PhD in comparative literature were completed at Washington University in St Louis. Before joining the University of Oxford, I taught at the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St Louis in the US and, prior to that, at the University of Exeter in Britain where I was also Director of the Centre for Mediterranean Studies. I am Founding member of Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation. Since joining St John’s since 2010, I served on several committees and held the office of Fellow Librarian and Keeper of the Archive from 2019 to 2023.

My key research interests include modern Arabic literature in relation to its past, to its socio-political contexts and to world literature. I have particular focus on issues of narrative form, cultural politics and comparative literature. I welcome postgraduate applications from students interested in these fields and Arabic literature more broadly. In addition to focused essays, which range from classical Arabic literature, the Arabic novel, Francophone literature of North African and cultural politics, I published a book on the writer al-Mas’adi from a comparative perspective (Routledge, 2006) and a book on the confluency between trade unionism, culture and revolution in Tunisia (UGTT, 2016). I edited The Novelization of Islamic Literatures: the intersections of Western, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish Traditions (2007) and published three monographs in collaboration with historians Abdeljalil Temimi, Maria Fusaro and Colin Heywood and (2002 and 2003 and 2010). More recently, I co-edited a volume on methods in comparative criticism with Matthew Reynolds, Ben Morgan and Celine Sabiron (2015), a volume on the university and society in the context of Arab revolutions and new humanism with Mohsen El Khouni and Mouldi Guessoumi (2016), and a volume on literature and transitional justice with Philippe Roussin (2022).

Personal Webpage
Faculty Webpage
Nationalism, Islam and Worldliterature
Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Mediterranean
A Revolution of Dignity and Poetry