Samia Mehrez is a Professor of Arabic Literature at AUC: 1992-2021. Tenured in 1995 Promoted for Full Professor in 2007. She obtained her BA and MA degrees at The American University in Cairo (AUC) and completed her PhD at University of California, Los Angeles in 1985. Her PhD dissertation focused on the works of the late Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani. She taught at Cornell University from 1984 to 1990 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies before joining AUC. She then joined AUCs Center for Arabic Studies, later the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, and taught there till 2021
Dr Mehrez taught courses in modern Arabic literature in Arabic and in translation, as well as courses on translation studies and theory. She is the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies at AUC which operated from 2009 to 2021.
She has published widely in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial literature, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani, AUC Press, 1994 and 2005; Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Routledge 2008, AUC Press 2010; Ibrahim Nagui: A Belated Visit, Dar-Al Shorouk, 2021 (in Arabic). Her edited anthologies A Literary Atlas of Cairo and The Literary Life of Cairo in which she has translated numerous Egyptian writers are published by AUC Press 2010, 2011 and in Arabic at Dar Al-Shorouk, Cairo. She is the editor of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, AUC Press 2012 and In the Shoes of the Other: Interdisciplinary Essays in Translation Studies from Cairo, Al-Kotob Khan 2019. She has translated into English Mona Prince’s memoir of Egypt’s January 2011 uprising entitled Ismi Thawra (Revolution is My Name, AUC Press 2014).
