Areas of Expertise

Brahim El Guabli is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. In addition to teaching different levels of Arabic language courses, Professor El Guabli teaches or is interested in teaching a variety of topics in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern literature, including trauma and memory, Saharan imaginations, Jews in Arabic literature and film, transitional justice processes, translation, current events, Marxist Leninist Movements, Afro-Arab solidarities, and decolonization movements.

His research covers areas of language politics, human rights, transitional justice, political violence, archive creation, memory studies, Amazigh/Berber literatures, and environmental humanities.

His journal articles have appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Arab Studies Journal, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He also authored a number of book chapters on memory, joint authorship practices in Morocco, and the return of Jews in literature and film. He is the co-editor of a two-volume special issue of The Journal of North African Studies Journal entitled “Violence and the politics of aesthetics: A postcolonial maghreb without borders” as well as the forthcoming anthology Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (Liverpool University Press).

Professor El Guabli’s first book manuscript is entitled  Other-Archives: Jews, Berbers, and Political Prisoners Rewrite the Post-1956 Moroccan Nation. Drawing on new materials in Arabic, Berber, French, and Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija), he makes a novel argument about the connections between cultural production, history writing and citizenship in post-1999 Morocco.

Professor El Guabli’s second book project is tentatively entitled Saharan Imaginations, From Mild to Wild:  Rethinking a Misunderstood Place. The latter is a study of how a host of authors have imagined, (mis)represented, and engaged with the Sahara since the 18^th century.