Brian T. Edwards

Brian T. Edwards is Dean of the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Prior to moving to Tulane in 2018, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies (MENA).
Edwards's scholarly interests and research focus on three main areas: the intersections between culture and politics, how ideas and attitudes about foreign spaces are formed in relation to cultural representations, and how contemporary American culture circulates globally, with particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa.
Edwards also advocates new approaches to language learning, at both university and K-12 levels, having written several op-eds on the topic and advanced language learning at both Tulane and Northwestern.
== Career ==
Edwards received his bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1990. He earned his master’s degree, his master of philosophy degree and in 1998 his PhD, all in American studies, from Yale.
Edwards joined Northwestern in 2000, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies for the English Ph.D. program from September 2009 to August 2012. As well, he was a core faculty member in comparative literary studies and international studies. He was also a faculty affiliate of the American Studies program, the program of African Studies, Screen Cultures, Rhetoric and Public Culture, and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.
In 2011, Edwards founded and became the Director of the Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) program at Northwestern. Under Edwards’ direction, MENA grew from a small faculty working group to a program with 20 core and language faculty and 13 affiliates, offering an undergraduate major and minor, curricula in Middle Eastern languages and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. certificate. MENA also hosts writers and filmmakers, while creating extensive programming on campus and in the community.
In 2015, he became Crown Professor in Middle East Studies in addition to becoming full Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern.
As of July 1, 2018, Edwards is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, where he oversees 34 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts—including 60 undergraduate majors and two dozen M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. programs—plus the Shakespeare Festival, Summer Lyric Theatre, Carroll Gallery, Tulane Marching Band, and the Middle America Research Institute. Since joining Tulane, Edwards has worked to advance a global liberal arts curriculum, forge a deeper relationship with New Orleans, and embrace the School's dual identity as a R1 research university and a liberal arts college. In that respect, in 2020, the School was awarded a grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation "to convene a year-long site-specific inquiry exploring changing historical narratives in New Orleans and the greater Gulf South region." In 2021, the School received another grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand its interdisciplinary Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Humanities. Edwards has also launched the Dean's Speaker Series on Anti-Racism and the Disciplines to foster discussion about the role of the liberal arts in addressing topics that matter to society.
== Work and influence ==
Edwards's push for the globalization of American Studies has been been highly influential in the field. In 2016, Allen Hibbard called Edwards "a leading figure in the area of transnational, global American studies." Similarly, writing about Edwards in 2017, Paul Giles characterizes him as a "senior scholar ... who has helped to shape the direction of international American studies over the past decade." Edwards has also been lauded for his consistent engagement with transnational and multilingual archives, particularly with respect to the Middle East and North Africa.
Edwards's first book, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (2005), examines "how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the same time that they displaced domestic social concerns—particularly about race relations—onto an 'exotic' North Africa." This work was well received and represented an important contribution to American Studies especially in its transnational and postcolonial reframing of the discipline. In his review of Morocco Bound in the journal Comparative Literature Studies, Allen Hibbard outlines the scope of the book: "Probing, timely, and richly suggestive, Edwards's study of the dynamics and select encounters between the Maghreb and the US from the early 1940s to the early 1970s presents familiar materials through different lenses and enlarges the frame to include portions of the Moroccan archive that have largely remained unknown and unexamined by US scholars." Hibbard also identifies some of the key contributions that Morocco Bound makes to American Studies:
By identifying and examining "critical interventions" that challenge or interrupt conventional US-centered narratives, particularly ones forged in the real or imagined space of North Africa, Edwards's study is a superb example of what Djelal Kadir calls for in his January 2003 PMLA article—'an exogenous assessment of America,' that is, 'a refocusing of America in the larger world context' (22).
As Malini Johar Schueller writes in her review in American Quarterly:
Morocco Bound is an exemplary work of postcolonial American studies scholarship, one acutely sensitive to the importance of the specificities of colonial and imperial relations in the Maghreb. Yet Morocco Bound is no predictable ideological study. Edwards constantly foregrounds the historical complexities of encounter in each text he analyzes while simultaneously presenting nuanced close readings. In the process, he challenges familiar theoretical paradigms and presents us with new possibilities.
Similarly, Ali Behdad's review of the book in the journal Comparative Literature characterizes Morocco Bound as follows:
Edwards’s illuminating study of America’s engagement with the Maghreb is a brilliant example of the kind of scholarship that is all too rare in the fields of postcolonialism and American studies. I have suggested elsewhere that postcolonial critics’ focus on Europe’s cultural and political hegemony has diverted attention from the need for a serious engagement with the complex and important question of U.S. imperialism in a new global order. Morocco Bound is an exemplary performance of what such an engagement might look like.
The edited collection Globalizing American Studies continues Edwards's contribution in breaking the national boundaries in American Studies in addition to pushing for a globalized engagement in other fields. In her review of Globalizing American Studies, Leisa Rothlisberger claims that "the editors’ introduction provides an instructive framework for thinking about the dimensions of global American studies. The editors present Globalizing American Studies as a corrective to the concept of 'American exceptionalism', with which American studies has a history of being complicit." This push for a globalized engagement with the US has also been important for other fields. For example, Meghan Warner Mettler writes about the book's contribution to Asian Studies in The Journal of Asian Studies: "taken together [the essays in the collection] offer encouragement to similar scholarship discovering any alternative lenses through which Asians may have come to view America." The book is also considered a key work in and for American Studies, with Evan Rhodes writing in American Quarterly that Edwards and Gaonkar's introduction to the volume is "a nuanced tour through the field’s major developments to date [and] a must-read for anyone interested in the future of a globalized American studies."
In After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East, Edwards considers "some of the ways in which American cultural forms have been altered, localized, and disoriented in their Egyptian, Iranian, and Moroccan adaptations" (199). Drawing from "a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran," the book "maps new routes of cultural exchange" that are "shaped by the digital revolution." This work not only extends Edwards's international approach to American Studies but it also places Middle Eastern studies in dialogue with discussions of the global circulation of American culture. While John Waterbury, in his review for Foreign Affairs, is critical of the book's insistence on the "untranslatability" of US popular culture as it is transformed in its reception in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, After the American Century has been well received and taken up in a wide range of disciplines both in the US and internationally. According to Giles, the book represents "a pioneering attempt to reconsider the function of textual practice in an era of digital transmission." Giles also adds that "we cannot fail to be impressed by the insightful qualities of Edwards’s critical intervention. If Quinn’s book is thought provoking and interesting, Edwards’s is a genuinely important contribution to our understanding of how American literary studies circulates internationally in the twenty-first century." Moreover, After the American Century has appealed to and been taken up in a wide range of disciplines both in the US and internationally. As Alex Lubin states in his review for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, "Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive. After the American Century is a valuable contribution not only to studies of transnational American Studies, but also to cultural studies across the MENA." In his review of the book in the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Peter Limbrick also claims that "Even when Edwards is not directly addressing gender, however, his methodology and sense of how culture circulates is relevant for anyone trying to theorize representations of gender and sexuality across transnational frames." In a similar fashion, Hugh Wilford makes a claim in the Journal of American History for the book's relevance to the discipline of American History, stating that "this is a welcome work, valuable for its rich readings of unfamiliar yet important Middle Eastern artists and for its stimulating arguments about the transnational circulation of American culture in our global, digital age". The book h been reviewed in publications as varied as Foreign Affairs, the The Middle East Journal|Middle East Journal, Post45, Choice Reviews|Choice, the Journal of American History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, the European Journal of American Culture, and the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar (Lebanon)|Al Akhbar.
Edwards's work in American and Middle East and North African Studies has also been influential in public debates about US-MENA relations and cultural circulation. He has also appeared in a number of media outlets, including NPR, PBS's WTTW, WMAQ-TV|NBC Chicago, and Voice of America.
In addition, Edwards is an advocate for language learning in K-12 and higher education and has published a number of op-eds and essays on the topic as well as liberal arts education in general in venues such as the The Chronicle of Higher Education|Chronicle of Higher Education, the Chicago Tribune, and The Hill.
Edwards's creative nonfiction has been published in McSweeney's and The Believer, with his essay "Watching Shrek in Tehran” having been selected as “Notable Travel Writing of 2010” in The Best American Travel Writing 2011, reprinted in Read Harder: Five More Years of Great Writing from The Believer (2014), and published in audio format in 2016.
== Awards and Honors ==
Edwards was named a 2005 Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York under its Islam Initiative, a 2008 New Directions Fellow by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and a Class of 2015 Emerging Leader by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Edwards also received Fulbright Senior Specialists Awards in Middle East Studies in 2009 and 2011.
From 2016 to 2017, Edwards served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’s Commission on Language Learning. The Commission was charged by Congress to examine language education in the U.S. and make recommendations for ways to meet the nation’s future education needs, resulting in the report America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century (February 2017). The Commission's findings have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Hill, the Boston Herald, Inside Higher Ed, and the Association for Psychological Science.
== Bibliography ==
=== Books ===
* Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, Duke University Press, 2005.
*After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East, Columbia University Press, 2016.
=== Edited collections ===
* Globalizing American Studies (with Dilip P. Gaonkar), University of Chicago Press, 2010.
*On the Ground: New Directions in Middle East and North African Studies, Northwestern University in Qatar, 2013.
=== Special issue ===
* "Cairo 2010: After Kefaya," edited with a critical introduction. A Public Space, no. 9 (Fall 2009), pp. 127–175.
=== Selected journal articles ===
* “Hollywood Orientalism and the Maghreb,” Boundary 2|boundary2 (online), The Maghreb after Orientalism (special b2o dossier), December 13, 2018.
* “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 74.3 (Fall 2018), 25–45.
* “Islam,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 3rd ed., edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (NY: NYU Press, 2020), pp. 137–141.
* “The World, the Text, and the Americanist,” American Literary History 25.1 (Spring 2013), 231–246.
* “doi:10.1215/08992363-1336372|Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,” Public Culture 23.3 (Fall 2011): 493–504.
* “doi:10.1002/9781444342789.ch28|Logics and Contexts of Circulation,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 454–472.
* “doi:10.1215/08992363-2007-002|American Studies in Tehran,” Public Culture 19.3 (2007): 415–424.
* “doi:10.1080/13629380701461394|Marock in Morocco: Reading Moroccan Films in the Age of Circulation,” Journal of North African Studies 12.3 (2007): 287–307. Special issue on North African film. Reprinted in North African Cinema in Global Context: Through the Lens of Diaspora, ed. Andrea Khalil (London and NY: Routledge, 2008).
* “doi:10.1093/alh/aji017|Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations,” American Literary History 17.2 (2005): 307–334.
* “doi:10.1215/1089201X-23-1-2-70|Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1&2 (2003): 70–86. Special issue: “Comparative (Post)colonialisms.”
* “doi:10.1080/13534640210130449|Fanon’s al-Jaza’ir, or Algeria translated,” Parallax (journal)|Parallax 8.2 (April/June 2002): 99–115. Special issue: “Fanon and the Impasses of Modernity.”
*"Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism," Film & History|Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 31.2 (2001): 13–24.
=== Selected creative nonfiction ===
* “Road to Rapid City,” The Believer, no. 108 (June 2014): 27–35. 
** Selected as “Notable Travel Writing of 2014” in The Best American Travel Writing 2015, Andrew McCarthy, Guest Editor (Houghton Mifflin 2015).
* “Letter from Cairo,” McSweeney's, no. 34 (Spring 2010): 16–18.
*"Watching Shrek in Tehran," The Believer, no. 70 (March/April 2010): 5–11.
**Selected as “Notable Travel Writing of 2010” in The Best American Travel Writing 2011, Sloane Crosley, Guest Editor (Houghton Mifflin 2011).
*"Kiddie Orientalism," The Believer, no. 54 (June 2008): 21–30.
== Personal life ==
Edwards is married to Kate Baldwin, who is Professor of English with joint appointments in the Department of Communication and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Tulane University.
Category:Professors of English
Category:American classical scholars
Category:American writers