Shaden M. Tageldin is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. From 2014–2018, she was also Founding Director of the University’s African Studies Initiative, a Title VI African Studies National Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in Arabic, English, and French, her work engages empire and postcolonial studies; trans-African and trans-Asian studies; critical translation theory; and ideologies of language and literature. Tageldin earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a new book, provisionally titled _Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature_. Her first book, _Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt_ (University of California Press, 2011; http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520265523), was awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2013 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Her most recent publications are “Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī’s Poetics of Comparative Literature,” in _PMLA_ (2023), and “_Tarjamah_: Negative Translation,” in _PMLA_ (2024). Other essays include “World Literature, World War: Revisiting Tayeb Salih’s _Season of Migration to the North_,” in _A Companion to World Literature_ (2020); “Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia,” _Journal of World Literature_ (2019); “Beyond Latinity, Can the Vernacular Speak?,” _Comparative Literature_ (2018); “Fénelon’s Gods, al-Ṭahṭāwī’s Jinn: Trans-Mediterranean Fictionalities,” _Philological Encounters_ (2017), awarded the Honorable Mention for both the 2017 Richard Stein Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize and the 2018 Nineteenth Century Studies Association Article Prize; “The Novel in Translation and Transition,” on francophone/arabophone intersections with the post-1945 African novel in English, in _Oxford History of the Novel in English_ (2016); “The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond,” _Journal of Historical Sociology_ (2014); “Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the _Nahḍah_ in U.S. Comparative Literary Studies,” _Journal of Arabic Literature_ (2012); “Mahfouz’s Posts,” in _Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz_ (2012); “The Returns of Theory,” _International Journal of Middle East Studies_ (2011); “Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Sibāʿī, and the Translations of ‘Religion’ in British Egypt,” _PMLA_ (2011), awarded the 2011 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize; and “One Comparative Literature? ‘Birth’ of a Discipline in French-Egyptian Translation, 1810–1834,” _Comparative Literature Studies_ (2010). Other publications include “The African Novel in Arabic,” in _The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel_, and “Which _Qalam_ for Algeria? Colonialism, Liberation, and Language in Djebar’s_L’amour, la fantasia_ and Mustaghānimī’s _Dhākirat al-jasad_,” in _Comparative Literature Studies_. Tageldin has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, the latter at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress; she has held other fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar program; Europe in the Middle East—Middle East in Europe program of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Fritz Thyssen Stiftung; and National Endowment for the Humanities, and she was awarded the 2005 ACLA Charles Bernheimer Prize. A senior editor of the _Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature_ and member of the editorial board of _Comparative Literature_ and advisory boards of _Comparative Literature Studies_ and _Journal of Arabic Literature_, Tageldin also has served on the editorial board of _Philological Encounters_ and on the Zukunftsphilologie Collegium. She is a past chair of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, co-chair of the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, delegate to the MLA Delegate Assembly for the MLA Division on Arabic Literature and Culture, secretary of the Executive Committee of the MLA Global Arab and Arab American Studies Forum, chair of the Executive Committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Arabic Literature and Culture, as well as vice chair of the Association of African Studies Programs.

Literature

Arabic

Colonialism

Comparative

Theory

19th-21st Centuries

African Studies

Translation

Anti-Racism

Africa (Sub-Saharan)

Egypt

Islamic World

Maghreb

Mashreq

Ottoman Empire

Arab & N Af Encounters W/Europe

Arab-Af Rltns & Islam

Arabic Lit, 19-20th C, In Comp Context

Arabic (fluent)

French (fluent)