Professor Christina Phillips

Tina Phillips is a literary specialist and scholar of the contemporary Arab world.

Tina studied Arabic at the University of Oxford before completing an MA in Linguistics and Translation and PhD in Arabic Literature at SOAS. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from 2007-2011 and then spent 14 years at the University of Exeter, where she served as Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies from 2022-25. She joined AMES as the His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Modern Arabic Studies in September 2025.

Tina’s research journey began with the novels of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz and the myriad ways in which they engage with Arab tradition and religious myth. This inspired a wider investigation of the relationship between Arabic literature and religion, including Sufism, Coptic Christianity and political Islam, which is the subject of her 2019 monograph Religion in the Egyptian Novel: Themes and Approaches published Edinburgh University Press. More recently, Tina’s research has focused on cultural engagements with environmental crisis in the Middle East and she is currently writing a monograph on Literature and Environment in Palestine 1960-2022.

Tina is a translator of modern Arabic literature and has translated works by major authors including Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Berrada and Hanan al-Shaykh. Tina is chair of the judging panel for the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.