Prof Shaden M Tageldin
Contact Me
tageldin@umn.edu
612-625-8445
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
218 Nicholson Hall
216 Pillsbury Dr SE
Affiliations
Links
- Disarming Words | University of California Press
- 2013 Harry Levin Prize Honorable Mention, American Comparative Literature Association
- Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize for 2011
- 2005 Bernheimer Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
- John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress
- American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship
- Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences/Fritz Thyssen Foundation
- Institute for Advanced Study, Spring 2013, University of Minnesota
- Institute for Advanced Study, Spring 2006, University of Minnesota
- Zukunftsphilologie Collegium, Forum Transregionale Studium (Berlin)
- African Studies Initiative, University of Minnesota
- Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota
- Consortium for the Study of the Asias, University of Minnesota
- Islamic Societies and Cultures Collective, University of Minnesota
- Global Race, Ethnicity, Migration (REM), University of Minnesota
Shaden M. Tageldin is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where she is also director of the African Studies Initiative, a Title VI African Studies National Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education. From 2013–2015, she was director of graduate studies for the Ph.D. programs in Comparative Literature and Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, as well as for the interdepartmental graduate minor in Moving Image Studies. Tageldin is the recipient of a 2013–2014 Arthur “Red” Motley Exemplary Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in English, Arabic, and French, her research and teaching engage several fields within a transnational and a translingual compass: empire and postcolonial studies; critical translation theory; trans-African and trans-Asian studies; the historiography of literary and cultural “renaissances”; the politics and ideologies of language, literary form, and literary genre; and literatures of migration and diaspora. Tageldin earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. Her first book, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2011), was awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2013 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA); the doctoral dissertation from which it evolved won the ACLA’s 2005 Charles Bernheimer Prize. Tageldin’s book analyzes the afterlives of two colonial occupations of Egypt—the French (1798) and the British (1882)—to show how Egyptian intellectuals, first as warily intrigued receivers of European “self-translations” into Arab-Islamicity and then as admiring producers of Arabic translations from European literature, psychologically attached themselves to empire even as they imagined themselves to be overcoming colonial domination. Her most recent publications are “Abu Shadi, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia,” Journal of World Literature 4.3 (August 2019), in Part I of a two-part special issue on World Literature and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Bhavya Tiwari and David Damrosch; “Beyond Latinity, Can the Vernacular Speak?”, Comparative Literature 70.2 (June 2018), in an ACLA Forum on Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone; and translations of the work of Hasan al-'Attar and 'Ali Mubarak, in The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda, ed. Tarek El-Ariss (Modern Language Association, 2018). Another essay, “World Literature, World War: Revisiting Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” is forthcoming (2019) in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Kenneth Seigneurie. Other publications include “Fénelon's Gods, al-Tahtawi's Jinn: Trans-Mediterranean Fictionalities,” in Philological Encounters 2.1–2 (2017), which received Honorable Mentions for the 2017 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Richard Stein Essay Prize and the 2018 Nineteenth Century Studies Association (NCSA) Article Prize; “Untranslatability,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report , ed. Ursula K. Heise et al. (2017); “The Novel in Translation and Transition,” in Volume 11 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi (2016); “(Post)Colonial Translation,” in Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies, ed. Lawrence Venuti (2016); “The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond,” in Journal of Historical Sociology 27.3 (2014); “The Incestuous (Post)Colonial: Soueif's Map of Love and the Second Birth of the Egyptian Novel in English,” in the Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (2013); “Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Nahdah in U.S. Comparative Literary Studies,” Journal of Arabic Literature 43.2–3 (2012); “Mahfouz's Posts,” in the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz; “The Returns of Theory,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43.4 (November 2011); “Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Siba‘i, and the Translations of ‘Religion’ in British Egypt,” PMLA 126.1 (January 2011), which received the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize for 2011; and “One Comparative Literature? ‘Birth’ of a Discipline in French-Arabic Translation, 1810-1834,” Comparative Literature Studies 47.4 (2010). Tageldin also has published on the African novel in Arabic; the politics of language, gender, and (post)coloniality in the Algerian women's fiction of Assia Djebar and Ahlam Mustaghanimi; and the poetics of postcolonial migration in Sakinna Boukhedenna and Agha Shahid Ali. Among other awards, she has held a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress; a U.S. Fulbright Scholar research award in Egypt; a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berlin-based research program “Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe,” co-sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; and two faculty fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the editorial board of Comparative Literature and of the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Arabic Literature and Philological Encounters. She has served as chair of the MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and divisional delegate to the MLA Delegate Assembly, co-chair of the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, chair and secretary of the executive committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Arabic Literature and Culture (now Forum), and secretary of the executive committee of the MLA Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Global Arab and Arab American Forum. Tageldin is currently writing a new book, provisionally titled Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature. In 2019, she is completing that book on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.