2021 Seminar Leader

Waïl S. Hassan

Professor of Comparative Literature and English

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

whassan@illinois.edu

Waïl S. Hassan is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, he is the author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (2003) and Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (2011). He has translated Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language from Arabic into English (2008) and Alberto Mussa’s Lughz al-qāf from Portuguese into Arabic (2015). He has edited several books and special issues, including Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz (2012, with Susan Muaddi Darraj), The Oxford Handbook of the Arab Novelistic Traditions (2017), and Literatura e (i)migração no Brasil (2020, with Rogério Lima), and is currently writing a book on Arabs in Brazil. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association.

2020 Seminar Leader

Vinay Dharwadker

Professor of English, World Literature, and South Asian Studies

University of Wisconsin–Madison

vdharwadker@wisc.edu

Vinay Dharwadker is a Professor of English, World Literature, and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His edited or co-edited volumes include the Norton Anthology of World Literature, The Oxford History of Poetry in English, The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, and Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2000). He is the author of the poetry collection Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (1994) and the translator of works from Hindi, Sanskrit, and Prakrit; his translated volume Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (2005), a collection of poems by the fifteenth-century mystic Kabir, won the 2007 Translation Prize in English from Sahitya Akademi (India’s national academy of letters). His interests include world literature in translation, modern planetary Anglophone literature, modern and contemporary British literature, and South Asian studies.