Marilyn Booth earned her D.Phil. in Modern Arabic Literature and Modern History of the Middle East at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (1985), funded by a Marshall Fellowship. From 1983-1985, she was the Joanna Randall-McIver Junior Research Fellow at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. She received her BA in Near Eastern Cultures and Languages from Harvard University (Summa Cum Laude, 1978), where she was also the first female recipient of the endowed Wendell Scholarship. She has received numerous postdoctoral fellowships, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Mellon, ACLS and the American Research Center in Egypt. From 2003-2008 she was associate professor in the Programs in Comparative and World Literature and Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 2006-2008. She has also taught at Brown University and the American University in Cairo, has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association, the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and is currently Book Review Editor of the Journal of Women’s History. In January 2009, she will join the faculty of the University of Edinburgh as holder of the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies.
Her research interests include the gender politics of Arabic fiction, the emergence of the Arabic novel in the nineteenth century and its relation to emergent gender activisms, early feminisms and Islamic discourses in the Arab world and Turkey, translation theory and practice, Arabic vernacular poetry and the literature of Arabic colloquials, autobiography and its uses as exemplary discourse, discourses on prostitution in modern Egypt as interventions in debates on gender and the nation, constructions of masculinity in early Arabic gender discourse and fiction, histories of the book, reading and the emergence of print cultures; and issues of human rights and the pressures of censorship.
She has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, including Thieves in Retirement by Hamdi Abu Golayyel, The Loved Ones by Alia Mamdouh, Disciples of Passion by Hoda Barakat and the same author’s The Tiller of Waters, Children of the Waters: Stories by Ibtihal Salem, Leaves of Narcissus, by Somaya Ramadan, The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat, Points of the Compass by Sahar Tawfiq, and My Grandmother’s Cactus: Stories by Egyptian Women. She has translated for the online magazine Words Without Borders, has received two translation awards (AATA and the Arkansas University Press Arabic Translation Prize), and was runner-up for the 2007 Saif al-Ghobashi-Banipal Prize. She has been an invited judge for literary translation awards.
Supervision
Professor Marilyn Booth is particularly interested in supervising postgraduate research on aspects of the following:
Modern Arabic literature, generally;
Gender, culture and writing in the Middle East
Theory and practice of literary translation with reference to Arabic
Vernacular Arabics in literature
Popular culture and literary expression
Arab feminisms and expressive culture
South Asia-Middle East cultural linkages
Journalism and literature in the Middle East
Publications
Books
May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Bayram al-Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies. Exeter: Ithaca Press (St. Antony's Middle East Monographs no. 22), 1990.
Translated into Arabic as: Ard al-habayib ba’ida: Rihla fi a’mal Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi, trans. Sahar Tawfiq, Cairo, al-Majlis al-a'la lil-thaqafa [Supreme Council for Culture, Gov. of Egypt], 2002).
Journal Articles
Translator v. author (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York. Translation Studies 1:2 (July 2008): 197-211.
Exploding into the Seventies: Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm, Shaykh Imam, and the Aesthetics of a New Youth Politics. Cairo Papers in Social Science. Thirty Years of Social and Political Protest in Egypt, forthcoming 2008.
From the Horse’s Rump and the Whorehouse Keyhole: Ventriloquized Memoirs as Political Voice in 1920s Egypt. Maghreb Review 32:2-3 (2007): 233-61.
Safely at Home: Narratives of Sexual Coercion in 1920s Egypt. Gender and History 16:3 (November 2004): 744-68. Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment, ed. Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao. Repr. as Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment: Gender and History (London: Blackwell, 2005).
Quietly Author(iz)ing Community: Biography as an Autobiography of Syrian Women in Egypt. L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14. Jg. Heft 2 (2003): 280-97. Leben texten.
’She Herself was the Ultimate Rule’: Arab Women’s Biographies of their Missionary Teachers, Islam and Christian- Muslim Relations 13:4 (October 2002): 427-48. Missionary Transformations, ed. Eleanor Doumato.
Woman in Islam: Men and the ‘Women’s Press’ in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt. International Journal of Middle East Studies 33:2 (2001): 171-201. Reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, vol. 166, edited by Linda Pavlovski (New York: Gale Group, 2005).
May Her Likes Be Multiplied: 'Famous Women Biography and Gendered Prescription in Egypt, 1892-1935. Signs 22:4 (1997): 827-90.
Exemplary Lives, Feminist Aspirations: Zaynab Fawwaz and the Arabic Biographical Tradition. Journal of Arabic Literature 26:1-2 (March-June 1995), 120-46.
Colloquial Arabic Poetry, Politics, and the Press in Modern Egypt. International Journal of Middle East Studies 24:3 (1992): 419-440.
Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyada's Studies of Three Women's Lives. Journal of Women's History 3:1 (Spring 1991): 38-61.
Book Chapters
Who Gets to Become the Liberal Subject? Ventriloquized Memoirs and the Individual in 1920s Egypt. Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean, Late 19th Century until the 1960s, edited by Christoph Schumann. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pp. 267-92.
Babies or the Ballot? Women’s Constructions of the Great War in Egypt. The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne. Beirut and Wurzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2006. Beiruter Texte und Studien, Band 99. Pp. 75-90.
On Gender, History… and Fiction. Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, edited by Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. 211-41.
Fiction’s Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper’s Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 274-95.
Infamous Women and Famous Wombs: Biography, Gender, and Islamist Concepts of Community in Contemporary Egypt. Autobiography and the Creation of Identity and Community in the Middle East from the Early Modern to the Modern Period, ed. Mary Ann Fay. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. Pp. 51-70.
Amthila min al-bina’ al-adabi li-hayat Malak Hifni Nasif. Min ra’idat al-qarn al-‘ishrin: Shakhsiyyat wa-qadaya, ed. Huda al-Sadda. Cairo: Multaqa al-Mar’a wa-l-Dhakira, 2001. Pp. 61-71.
The Egyptian Lives of Jeanne d'Arc. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu Lughod. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 171-211. [Published in Arabic as al-Hayawat al-misriyya li-Jan dark, trans. ‘Abd al-Hakim Hassan, in al-Haraka al-nisa’iyya wa-al-tatawwur fi al-Sharq al-awsat, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod. Cairo: al-Majlis al-a‘la lil-thaqafa, 1999. Pp. 189-234.]
Poetry in the Vernacular. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. 463-82.
Other
Middle East Women’s and Gender History: State of a Field. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (e-journal) 4:1 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cch New Directions in Women’s History.
Beneath Lies the Rock: Contemporary Egyptian Poetry and the Common Tongue. World Literature Today 75:2 (Spring 2001): 257-66.
Al-Tarikh al-fardi wa’l-tarikh al-jam’i: Kitabat al-mudhakkirat fi Misr 1920. (Individual and Collective History: Writing the Memoir in 1920s Egypt). Multaqa al-Qahira al-thalith lil-ibda’ al-riwa’i al-‘arabi 2005: al-Riwaya wa’l-tarikh (The Novel and History), 3 vols., Cairo: Supreme Council for Culture, 2008), vol. 2, 365-92.
Activism through Literature: Arguing Women’s Rights in the Middle East. Yale Review (January 2005): 1-26.
When I Met Saddam Hussein. In L’Irak de la crise au chaos, edited by Kenneth Brown. Editions Ibis Press/Mediterranees, 2004, pp. 282-85.
Framing the Imaginary: Conditions of Literary Production in Egypt. Peuples Méditerranéens No. 77 (Oct. 1996): 131-53.
