Narrative

Shaden M. Tageldin is assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, where she joined the faculty in August 2004. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in English, Arabic, and French, her research and teaching engage several fields within a transnational and a translingual compass: empire and postcolonial studies; critical translation theory; the historiography of literary and cultural “renaissances”; the politics and ideologies of language, literary form, and literary genre; and literatures of migration and diaspora. Tageldin earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. Her book, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, forthcoming from the University of California Press, analyzes the afterlives of two colonial occupations of Egypt—the French (1798) and the British (1882)—to show how Egyptian intellectuals, first as warily intrigued receivers of European “self-translations” into Arab-Islamicity and then as admiring producers of Arabic translations from European literature, psychologically attached themselves to empire even as they imagined themselves to be overcoming colonial domination. Based on her award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the 2005 Charles Bernheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, Tageldin’s book traces the psychodynamics of (post)colonial translation through both literary representations of Egyptian-European encounter and French-Arabic and English-Arabic literary translations. She has published essays on the African novel in Arabic; the politics of language, gender, and (post)coloniality in the Algerian women's fiction of Assia Djebar and Ahlam Mustaghanimi; the poetics of postcolonial migration in Sakinna Boukhedenna and Agha Shahid Ali; the nineteenth-century Egyptian translator and intellectual “reformer” Rifa’a al-Tahtawi; and language, colonialism, and dismemberment in Naguib Mahfouz. A past fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, in 2006–2007 she held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berlin-based research program “Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe,” co-sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.