Hoda El Shakry's teaching and research interests lie in twentieth century literature, criticism and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa. Her scholarship traverses the fields of modern Arabic and Francophone North African literature, Islam and secular criticism, postcolonial studies, narrative theory and semiotics, as well as philosophy. Her current research explores how the confluence of modern Arab literature with Islamic Thought stages a political, aesthetic and historiographic intervention into the divide between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ discourses. Her dissertation, “Qur'anic Invocations: Narrative Temporalities in Twentieth Century North African Literature,” examines Arabophone and Francophone literature of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. It investigates how literary engagements with Islamic discourse complicate the narratives of nationalism, modernity and postcoloniality in relation to both colonial and nationalist ideologies. Her publications include: “Apocalyptic Pasts, Orwellian Future’s: Elle Flanders’ Zero Degrees of Separation ” in GLQ (2010) and “Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam and the End of Time in al-Tahir Wattar’s al-Zilzal ” in the Journal of Arabic Literature (2011). Her forthcoming research explores the intersection of Humanism with Islamic Thought in North African literary and cultural journals. She is also currently working on a collaborative translation of the avant-garde Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas .
