Professor Tina Phillips
- His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Professor of Modern Arabic Studies
Contact
About
BIOGRAPHY
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 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 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.
Research
Research interests
- Modern Arabic Literature
- Environmental Humanities of the Middle East
- Palestine Studies
- Comparative Literature
- Religon & Literature
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Religion in the Egyptian Novel: Themes and Approaches. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
An Iraqi in Paris by Samuel Shimon. London, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2011. Arabic novel, co-translated with Piers Amodia.
Like A Summer Never to be Repeated by Mohammed Berrada. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009. Arabic novel translation.
A Beauty Parlour for Swans by Hanan al-Shaykh. London: The Royal Parks, 2009. Arabic story translation, published as a book.
Morning and Evening Talk by Naguib Mahfouz. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007. Arabic novel translation.
Journal articles
‘Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Case Study of Consecration, Annexation, and Decontextualization in Arabic–English Literary Translation’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 58/2 (2023), pp. 375-90.
‘Leila Aboulela’s The Translator: Reading Islam in the West’, Wasafiri 27/1 (2012), pp. 66-72.
‘The Game of Remembering: A Study of Narrative Strategies and the Postmodern Theme in Muhammad Barrada’s Mithl Sayf Lan Yatakarrar’, Middle Eastern Studies 14/1 (2011), pp. 71-87.
‘An Attempt to Apply Gérard Genette’s Model of Hypertextuality to Najib Mahfuz’s Malhamat al-Harafish’, Middle Eastern Literatures 11/3 (2008), pp. 283-300.
‘Fragmentation and Intertextuality: Strategies to Represent Reality in Najib Mahfuz’s Al-Maraya’, Fusul 69 (2006), pp. 209-29 (in Arabic).
‘Bibliography of Studies of Najib Mahfuz in English’, Fusul 69 (2006), pp. 403-16 (in Arabic).
Book chapters
Forthcoming: ‘Sufi Themes and Motifs in Modern Literary Fiction’, in Brill Handbook of Sufi Studies, volume on Sufi Literature, ed. Alexander Kynsh and Blal Orfali. (Finalising draft. Submit March 2025).
‘The Domestic Other: Islam in Modern Arabic Literature’, in G. Nash and S. Hackett, eds., Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film (Islamic Studies Series), London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 118-130.
‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth Century Arab Writers, vol.
346, ed. Majd al-Mallah & Coeli Fitzpatrick. Detroit and New York: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008.