introduction/brief CV
About
I am Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English, College of Language Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, and Head of the College's Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Technologies Lab. I hold a PhD in English from The Ohio State University.
My research concerns the reliability of cross-cultural communication: what happens when a novel, a memoir, or a translation is asked to explain one culture to another, and how far it can be trusted to do so. That question is the subject of my book, The Reliability Effect in Anglophone Arab Writing and Translation, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2027.
Research
My work covers contemporary Anglophone Arab writing, postcolonial and transnational studies, world and comparative literature, and narrative theory, with a particular interest in cultural translation.
Research interests: contemporary Anglophone Arab writing; postcolonial and transnational studies; world and comparative literature; narrative theory and narrative reliability; cultural translation and cross-cultural communication; AI, translation, and world literature.
Teaching and Supervision
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in world literature, literary and critical theory, and English literature, and I supervise M.A. research in comparative literary studies.
Prospective supervisees apply through the Department's graduate programs; I do not accept students for supervision directly. The Department's doctoral program is currently in applied linguistics only, and there is no doctoral admission in literature at present.
The Lab
The Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Technologies Lab rests on one premise: language AI should be judged by language experts. The Lab puts three questions to any language AI system: how it translates, how it teaches, and how it represents languages and cultures. Arabic runs through all three.
Beyond the University
I host Reading the World | قراءة العالم, a bilingual podcast in English and Arabic.
Contact
Office: Room 2024, second floor, Building 9, College of Language Sciences
Email: alialhajji@ksu.edu.sa
areas of expertise
- World Literature
- Postcolonial Theory and Criticism
- Contemporary Anglophone Arab Writing
- Arab American Literature and Cultural Studies
- Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
- Transnational and Diasporic Literary Studies
- Narrative Theory and Narrative Reliability
- Literary Translation and Cross-Cultural Communication
- Global Anglophone Literature
- Higher Education, Knowledge Production, and Cultural Policy
publications
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يُقَدِّمُ الكتاب نظريات الأدب العالميّ المهمة وتطبيقاتها ويُناقش موضوعات ومفاهيم الأدب العالميّ الأساسيّة، متضمنةً إشكاليّة تصوّر الشموليّة الأدبيّة، ومقارنة الأعمال الأدبيّة عبر التاريخ والثقافات…
Within this dissertation, I pay exclusive attention to methodologies of cross-cultural communication in post–World War II Anglophone Arab literature.
courses
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يقدّم هذا المقرر النظريات النقدية الحديثة بوصفها أدوات قراءة، لا مذاهب تُحفظ. نبدأ بالأسئلة الكبرى التي تنتظم حولها النظرية النقدية: ما النص؟ ومن يصنع معناه؟ وأين يقع القارئ من ذلك كله؟ ثم ننتقل…
A graduate survey of literary theory from Formalism and New Criticism through structuralism, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and archetypal criticism, and on to post-structuralism, New Historicism,…
An introduction to Shakespeare through close reading of at least one comedy and one tragedy. We read the plays as scripts written for a working theater: how the verse and prose move, how scenes…
office hours
| Saturday | Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| from | _ | _ | 01:30 PM | _ | 12:20 PM | _ | _ |
| to | _ | _ | 03:45 PM | _ | 02:30 PM | _ | _ |
| location | _ | _ 2103 | _ | _ 2103 | _ | _ | _ |