Assistant Professor, Arabic Literature and Language
About
With a PhD in literary theory, Elmeligi publishes on comparative literature, Arabic, and SWANA cultures. Specializing in narratology, visual narratives, psychoanalysis, and gender, from Classical to contemporary times, he examines the development of motifs from mythology to film, ancient art to graphic novels. Texts and authors he studied include the Arabian Nights, Shahnameh, Persian miniatures, ancient Egyptian narratives, Toni Morrison, Bernard Shaw, Abbas Kiarostami, Joe Sacco, Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Radwa Ashour.
His first book The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia (Routledge, 2019) is a critical anthology of more than 200 Arab women poets, most of whom are translated and discussed for the first time in English. His second book, Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) examines narratives of migration and return from as early as Ibn Tufayl’s 12th century Hayy ibn Yaqzan to Miral Al-Tahaway’s Brooklyn Heights, with references going back to ancient Egyptian narratives, and texts from countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Elmeligi comes to Michigan after more than 20 years of building Arabic language, literature and translation programs in Egypt and the United States, including at Middlebury College Study Abroad and Macalester College. At the University of Michigan-Dearborn he designed and is currently directing two new certificates, the Arabic Translation Certificate and the Comparative Literature Certificate.
In addition to academics, he also published two graphic novels that he wrote and illustrated, Y and Y, and Jamila.
Director Arabic Translation Certificate
Director Comparative Literature Certificate
Research Areas: Arabic and comparative literature, translation, visual narratives, gender studies.
Selected Publications:
BOOKS:
Elmeligi, Wessam. Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
Elmeligi, Wessam. The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia, Routledge, 2019.
CHAPTER:
Elmeligi, Wessam. “I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib: Theory and Visual Analysis.” In Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia. Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran (Eds.), Routledge, Forthcoming, 2022.
“It Is Not Just Phonetics and Aristocrats – It Is Sexuality and Politics: The Adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in the Egyptian Theatre.” In Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre: Translation, Performance, Politics, ed. Sirkku Aaltonen & Areeg Ibrahim, Routledge, 2016.
ARTICLES:
"Islands, Rooms, and Queues: Three Tropes in Arabic Science Fiction." Journal of Science Fiction, 4(2), 2021. 36–49
“Unreliable Author: Narrative Duality in Sonallah Ibrahim’s ʾAmrīkānlī.” Authorship 8, no.1. Ghent: Ghent University/DOAJ, 2019. 1-17
“Narrative Fluidity: Intermedial Interpretation of the Persian Legend, Khosrow and Shirin: Abbas Kiarostami’s film Shirin, Ferdowsi’s miniatures, and Nizami Ganjavi’s 12th century Epic Khamsa.” Image & Narrative 19, no.2, 2018. 105-123
Selected Conference Presentations
Elmeligi, Wessam. “Staying South: Alternate Arab Diaspora in They Die Strangers and The Other Place.” Breaking Boundaries: Reimagining Borders in Postcolonial and Migrant Studies. Manchester Met’s Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies. Manchester Metropolitan University. 2021, September 3
Elmeligi, Wessam. “Reclaiming Their Status through Poetry: A Literary and Digital Textual Analysis of the Medieval Poetry of Arab Women.” (Mis)Communication, Community, and Translation in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. International Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson. 2021, May 8-9.
Elmeligi, Wessam. “Colonialism and Resistance in the Egyptian Novel and Cinema.” Empire, Independence & Decolonization in Global History. World History and Literature Initiative. University of Michigan International Institute. 2019.
Awards and Recognition
Educator of the Year (nominee), Macalester College, 2013
Academic Excellence Faculty Award, Alexandria University, Damanhur Campus, 2007
Fund for the Advancement of Collaborative Teaching, Macalester College, 2018 (with Professor Ernesto Ortiz-Diaz) to develop course “Hyphenating Identities: Multiculturalisms in Al-Andalus and the Americas”
Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Macalester College, 2008-2009 Fulbright Award, Summer Institute on Contemporary Literature, University of Louisville, Kentucky, 1999
Scholarship Recipient, award sponsored by Alexandria University, Edinburgh University, and the British Council in Alexandria for “New Worlds: British Culture in the Twentieth Century,” Scottish Universities’ International Summer, 1995
