Scholar Profile : Adam Talib

Adam Talib
Course: D.Phil. Oriental Studies
College: Balliol
Nationality: United States
Status: Current Student
Scholarship Year: 2008
Academic Interests
My research deals primarily with the tradition of Arabic poetry and my disciplinary bent is that of literary history. My doctoral thesis is a study of a specific innovative generic and poetic trend in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. My Master's thesis focussed on the place of poets from al-Hirah in the canon of pre-Islamic poetry. I am also interested in the history of what we can - inaccurately, but succinctly - call classical Islamic literatures: Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Urdu. While my focus is fairly fixed on poetry, I am also interested in larger issues of cultural history, including sexuality, literacy and education, urbanity, social stratification, but, for the moment, I am most interested in how these issues are treated in poetry and other literary sources.
About me
I studied comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles where I focussed - to the extent possible in the US university system - on mediaeval Arabic and French literatures. Prof. Theo Ruiz awoke my interest in the pre-modern and Prof. Michael Cooperson introduced me to the rewarding world of the Abbasid caliphate. Almost as soon as I'd read my first lines of pre-modern Arabic poetry (in this case, 8th-9th centuries), I was hooked. In retrospect, my interest in pre-modern poetry - a rather ivory tower, 'dis-engaged' topic of scholarly inquiry - was not coincidentally forged against the backdrop of the occupation of Iraq, and although much of the poetry I studied and continue to study was written in Baghdad, I'm certain that this sudden interest in a recondite scholarly subject as well as my transformation into a serious student, which - I will diplomatically say - I haven't always been, was a bit like burying my head in the sand. I left Los Angeles for Cairo in 2006 to pursue a Master's degree in Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo. There I studied with Profs. Mahmoud El-Rabie, Mohamed Birairi, Nelly Hanna, and El-Said Badawi. I like to think that the me who left Cairo at the end of my studies who'd have been slightly, if justifiably, appalled at the me who'd arrived in 2006. In 2008, I came to Oxford to study for a doctorate with Prof. Geert Jan van Gelder on a Clarendon Fund scholarship. For the 2010-11 academic year, I have received a DAAD scholarship to come to the University of Muenster and pursue further thesis research in consultation with Prof. Thomas Bauer. I will return to Oxford to complete my thesis in the 2011-12 academic year. I should also mention here, in passing, that while at UCLA I studied literary translation with Prof. Michael Henry Heim whose seminar inspired a passion that leads directly to my translation (published in 2009) of Mekkawi Said's 2006 novel 'Cairo Swan Song' (Taghridat al-Baj'a) and a forthcoming translation of Khairy Shalaby's 2000 novel 'The Hashish Waiter' (Salih Heesa).