Marilyn Booth

Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. In 2014-15 she was Senior Humanities Research Fellow, New York University Abu Dhabi and before that, Iraq Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her most recent scholarly book is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siecle Egypt (Edinburgh, 2015); edited collections include Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010) and a Journal of Women’s History special issue, ‘Women’s autobiography in the Middle East and South Asia’ (2013). She also writes on vernacular Arabic writing, early Arabic journalism, and practices and politics of literary translation. She has translated numerous novels, short story collections and memoirs from the Arabic, most recently The Penguin’s Song by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud (City Lights Books, 2015), and No Road to Paradise, also by Daoud (American University in Cairo Press, 2017), winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal. (Photo credit: Courtesy of the author)