FIELD: 18th-century British and French literature and intellectual history; early 19th-century novel; literature of empire and exploration; genealogies of modernity; the Arabic novel and film; slave narratives. He has taught courses on realism and the evidence of the senses, European philosophy, the eighteenth-century novel, and the literature of empire.

SPECIAL INTERESTS/AUTHORS: Empiricism, science, and realism; the rhetoric and literature of War; Literature and national narratives; historiography; literature and ethnography; Proust; literature and philosophy

Ala Alryyes's interests include the eighteenth-century novel and literature (Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos); European intellectual history (Locke, Hume, Burke, Rousseau, Arendt, Lukács). He is particularly interested in the novel and its formal relations to society and history as well as in the Enlightenment and its literary productions.Alryyes has published articles on Defoe, Sterne, and legal narratives.

He is the author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (Harvard UP, 2001) and the translator and editor of "O, People of America": Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, with a facsimile of the original manuscript (Forthcoming). He is currently working on two book manuscripts: War's Knowledge and the Laws of Nature: Subjectivity, Conflict, and Worldmaking in Philosophy and the Novel and Mimesis and the Senses.