Department of Near Eastern
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Roger Allen obtained his doctoral degree in modern Arabic literature from Oxford University in 1968; he was the first student to obtain a doctorate in modern Arabic literature at Oxford, under the supervision of Dr. M.M. Badawi. The topic of the dissertation was a study (and English translation) of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s renowned narrative, Hadith `Isa Ibn Hisham. The study was later published as A Period Of Time (1st edition, 1974; 2nd edition 1992). Roger Allen has retained a life-long interest in the writings of the Al-Muwaylihi family, and in 1998 he was asked by Professors Sabry Hafez and Gaber Asfour to prepare an edition of the complete works of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (now published [2002]), and later of the complete works of Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, for publication in a series of “complete works” published by Al-Maglis al-A`la li-al-Thaqafah (Supreme Council for Culture) in Cairo.

In 1968 Roger Allen emigrated to the United States and took a position in Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (a position he still holds as Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature). This position is actually the oldest professorial post in Arabic (as a separate language in its own right) in the United States, dating back to 1788. At the university he has taught many generations of students, now including some of the most distinguished members of the younger generation of specialists in Arabic literature. He has also been very involved in the improvement of methods of teaching the Arabic language in American universities and colleges; he has written a textbook (Let’s Learn Arabic, 1986-88) and conducted many workshops in the USA, Europe, and the Arab world on language teaching.

In the late 1960s Roger Allen began to concentrate his research on modern Arabic fiction. He began by translating a collection of short stories by Naguib Mahfouz--God’s World (1973), the one mentioned by the Nobel Committee in their citation in 1988 (Roger Allen was centrally involved in the nomination process itself—see the article “Arabic Literature and the Nobel Prize,” in World Literature Today—“A Nobel Symposium”, Winter 1988).He has also translated into English Mahfouz’s Al-Summan Wa-Al-Kharif (1985), Al-Maraya (1st edition, 1977; 2nd edition 1999), and (unpublished) Al-Karnak. He has also published many individual studies of works by Mahfouz. In addition to the fiction of Mahfouz, he has also translated (and worked closely with) Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Al-Safina, and Al-Bahth `An Walid Mas`Ud), Yusuf Idris (the collection of stories, In The Eye Of The Beholder, and also a volume of studies, Critical Perspectives On Yusuf Idris), `Abd al-rahman Munif (Al-Nihayat), and Mayy Telmissany (Dunyazad—short-listed in England for the prize for the best translated novel of 2000).

In 1978 Roger Allen delivered at the University of Manchester in England a series of lectures on the Arabic novel that were subsequently published as a book in 1982, The Arabic Novel (1st edition 1982, Arabic edition, 1986; 2nd edition 1995, 2nd Arabic edition 1998). This book has been widely used throughout the world as an introduction to the novel genre in the Arab world, and it is also used at several Arab-world universities. Beyond this book-length study, he has also prepared a very large number of individual articles on modern Arabic fiction, novels, novellas, and short-stories, that have appeared in journals, festschrifts, and conference volumes (and in both English and Arabic).

In 1988 Cambridge University Press consulted with Roger Allen about the future of the series of Volumes, The Cambridge History Of Arabic Literature, after the initial volumes had been heavily criticized. As a result of discussions, the principles used in organizing the series were significantly altered. In particular, Roger Allen himself became the editor of the volume in that series, The Post-Classical Period (under preparation), on Arabic culture’s most problematic era, that between (approximately) 1150 and 1850, a huge period of time about which not only is little known but also “critical” verdicts are coloured by the application of questionable esthetic principles. In the same year, Cambridge University Press posed him the ultimate challenge: to write a one-volume study of the Arabic literary tradition as a whole. The work on this volume took five years, and appeared in full form as The Arabic Literary Heritage in 1998 (and in abbreviated paperback form in 2000, as Introduction To Arabic Literature; an Arabic version of the larger volume is in press in Cairo). This work has been extremely well received, and many scholars now regard it as the standard work in the field.

Roger Allen has served as an editor of several journals, including the Journal Of Arabic Literature, Literature East & West, and Al-Arabiyya, and was Arabic editor of the series of encyclopedia volumes, World Literature In The 20th Century (New York, Ungar). For the same press (Ungar Publications) he produced a large English anthology of critical writings in Arabic on modern Arabic literature, Modern Arabic Literature (Library of Literary Criticism, 1987). He is currently Executive-Editor (with Professor Van Gelder of Oxford University) of Middle Eastern Literatures. He is also series editor of the Dictionary Of Literary Biography Arabic Literature Project (with multiple volumes planned). Roger Allen is also a member of two major projects in translation: East-West Nexus/Prota, directed by Dr. Salma Jayyusi, and “Memoires de la Mediterranee”, a European project through which he participated in the translation of the works of Mayy Telmissany and Al-Kuni mentioned above.

Roger Allen maintains close contacts with litterateurs in the Arab world. He is a frequent visitor to Cairo and the conferences of Al-Maglis al-A`la li-al-Thaqafa, and he has also become involved in the activities of the University of Tunis at Manouba (PhD supervision) and a number of universities in Morocco, including Muhammad V in Rabat (lecturing in the graduate seminar of Muhammad Bannis).

His current research interests are focused on a number of issues within the broader field of Arabic literature: the problems of evaluation of literary works within the complexities of a post-colonial situation; the urgent need to rewrite the literary history of most regions of the Arab world to reflect new understandings concerning the relative significance of different cultural trends; and the status of the short story (and fiction in general) in the Arab world in the new era of alternative means of publication and indeed new “media”. Above all, it is Roger Allen’s hope to maintain and increase the kinds of academic, scholarly, and personal contact between Western specialists and Arab writers and critics, that being the most important development to have occurred during the course of his now 36-year long career.