Dr. William Granara is Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he currently serves as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is also founding director of Harvard’s Summer School program, Postcolonial Encounters: France and the Arab World, in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Professor Granara specializes in the history and cultures of the Muslim Mediterranean. He writes on cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Christendom throughout the Middle Ages. He is author of Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, I.B. Tauris, was published in June 2019. His second monograph, Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian, was published by One World Press’s Makers of the Muslim World in 2021. He is also co-editor of The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art and Science, Brill (2019).
In addition, he writes on contemporary Arabic literature and has published translations of several Egyptian and North African novels. His more recent publications include: “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism and the Andalusian Chronotope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel” (2005); “Nile Crossings: Hospitality and Revenge in Egyptian Rural Narratives” (2010), “The Historical Poetics of Jurji Zaidan’s Andalusian Fictional Cosmos” (2013), and “Contesting the Mediterranean in Colonial North African Literature” (2019).
