I teach mainly eighteenth-century literature, and more specifically the uses of the eighteenth century in cinema. During the course of my masters seminar, we look at theories of adaptation, at discourse on cinema, as well as at transpositions of historical periods. We analyse parallel scenes from films and novels to understand different modes of representation (we are not interested in ideas of the “authentic”…).

In 2021-2, we studied:

• Adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by Luis Buñuel.
• Adaptations of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews by Tony Richardson, as well as his Tom Jones (1963).
• Adaptations of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
• Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite.

It was understood that everyone had read the novels on which these films were based, so as to allow discussion.

This gives us an insight both into “canonical” novels of the eighteenth century, and their possible uses in different visual genres.

In the second semester we studied postcolonial literatures reading in particular the following:

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. [1899] Revised Edition. Edited by Cedric Watts. Oxford: OUP, 2008. World’s Classics.
• Matar, Hisham. In the Country of Men. London: Viking-Penguin, 2006.
• Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. [1979] London: Picador, 2020.
• Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

I also convene a doctoral seminar in postcolonial theory.

Over the years I have taught, and still supervise, on theories of fiction, linguistic analysis of literary discourse, contemporary British fiction and on a variety of authors ranging from Shakespeare from Burney, Conrad to Kureishi, Rushdie to Roy.

In 2022-23, my masters seminar in postcolonial literatures will be devoted to Arabic literatures in English, looking in particular at authors such as Rabih Alameddine, Diana Abou-Jaber, Layla Halabi, etc.