Hoda El Shakry

Affiliated with the Divinity School; Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; Department of Middle Eastern Studies; and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Trained in Comparative Literature, I am a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, visual culture, and criticism from North Africa and the Middle East. My research is at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, Islamic philosophy, film and art theory, as well as gender and sexuality studies. Working across North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Arabic and French, my work attends to the uneven histories of aesthetic sensibilities, literary forms, and modes of critique. Adopting an interdisciplinary and transhistorical lens, I interrogate the consolidation and canonization of literary forms—such as the novel and literary journal—as well as genres—such as speculative and science fiction. I consider how the universalization of Euro-American literary taxonomies, theoretical paradigms, and geopolitical logics reify certain reading practices while occluding others. My research subsequently emphasizes the dialogic relationship between aesthetics and ethics by engaging a rich body of Islamic philosophy that disrupts the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary studies. 

My first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2019) was awarded the ACLA’s 2018 Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award and the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. It explores the influence of Qurʾanic textual, hermeneutical, and philosophical traditions on Arabophone and Francophone fiction from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Placing canonical Francophone writers into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, the study attends to literature as a site in which the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives.

My current book project, Printed Matter(s): Critical Histories of Maghrebi Cultural Journals, theorizes twentieth-century Arabophone, Francophone, and bilingual journals from the Maghreb. Maghrebi cultural journals bridged genres and textual practices across the arts, literature, social and political thought, philosophy, and religion. The book attends to the unique temporal logics, readership communities, and affiliative networks within Maghrebi print culture histories. Looking beyond the nation as both an imagined and sovereign entity, I consider how periodicals model a praxis of cultural pedagogy centered on a shared set of ethical values, aesthetic interests, and literary sensibilities.

I serve on the editorial boards of the Middle Eastern Literatures and Journal of Modern Literature.

Before joining the University of Chicago I was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State and a Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

I advise Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. students across Comparative Literature, Middle East & North African Studies, Islamic Studies; African Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies and French & Francophone Studies.

Dissertation Highlights: 

• “Godfearing: A Literary and Ethnographic Study of Taqwā in Early Islamic Texts and Contemporary Egyptian Preaching;”
• “Maddening Love: Islamic Thought and the Ethics of Desire in the Legend of Layla and Majnun;”
• “Transgressing Realism: Speculation and Futurity in Global Middle Eastern Speculative Fiction;”
• “Forms of Resilience: African Fiction and the Crisis of Capitalism;”
• “Al-Tajrīb (Experimentalism) in the Moroccan New Novel and the Debate over Legitimacy;”
• “Wonders and Curiosities: Itinerant Writing Across Ottoman Worlds.”

•  “Adab: Literary Form and Social Praxis,” in An Arabic Theoretical Lexicon Special Feature: PMLA 139.1 (April 17, 2024): 110-119.
• “Revolutionary Gazes: Gender Politics in Contemporary Tunisian Film,” World Humanities Report, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), 2023.
• “Jinn & Jins: Sensuous Piety as Queer Ethics,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2023): 1–25.
• “The Ontology of Becoming,” PMLA 137.2 (May 25, 2022): 370-380.
• “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5 (March 18, 2021): 669-690.
• The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
• “Abdelwahab Meddeb and the Po/Ethics of Sufism.” Expressions Maghrébines 16.2 (Winter 2017): 95-115.
• “Printed Matter(s): Critical Histories and Perspectives on Tunisian Cultural Journals,” ALIF: A Journal of Comparative Poetics 37 (2017): 140-168.
• “Lessons from the Maghreb.” In Arabic Literature in the Classroom: Teaching Methods, Theories, Themes and Texts, Ed. Muhsin al-Musawi. New York & London: Routledge, 2017: 109-129.
• “Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghrébin,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES 20.2 (2016): 8-17.
• “Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam and the End of Time in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s al-Zilzāl,” Journal of Arabic Literature 42.2-3 (2011): 120-147.
• “Apocalyptic Pasts, Orwellian Futures: Elle Flanders’ Zero Degrees of Separation,” GLQ 16.4 (2010): 611-621.

• “Arabfuturism: Other Worlds and Worlding Otherwise”
• “Horror, Abjection, and the Monstrous Feminine”
• “Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts”
• “Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory”
• “Gendering Arabs: Embodiment, Affect, Agency”
• “North Africa Literature & Film”
• “Contemporary Critical Theory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics”
• “Gender & Sexuality in World Civilizations”