English

EDUCATION:
S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Harvard University

INTERESTS: 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; empiricism, science, and realism; the rhetoric and literature of War; literature and national narratives; historiography; 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 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, an 1831 Arabic slave narrative written in North Carolina (Hopkins, Forthcoming). He has taught courses on realism and the evidence of the senses, European philosophy, the eighteenth-century novel, and the literature of empire. He is currently working on two book manuscripts: Mimesis and the Senses and Vulnerability: The Novel, the Enlightenment, and War.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: European Literary Tradition, Arabic Novel in Translation