Toorawa named Blanshard Professor in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Shawkat M. Toorawa, a world-renowned scholar and translator of extraordinary breadth — who explores classical, medieval, and modern Arabic literature, the literary dimensions of the Qur’an, medieval Baghdad, the legendary Waqwaq tree and islands, Indian Ocean studies, modern poetry, and contemporary Anglophone Muslim women’s writing — has been appointed the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor of Comparative Literature.
Toorawa is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the departments of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature. He also has affiliations with the programs in Humanities and Medieval Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies.
His co-authored book “Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2001) is a study of a millennium of Arabic autobiographical writing and a powerful critique of foundational European scholarship. In “Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture” (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005) Toorawa re-evaluates the literary history and landscape of ninth-century Baghdad. “A Time Between Ashes and Roses: Poems” (Syracuse University Press, 2004) is the first critical edition and complete translation of a collection by leading modern Arab poet, Adonis. “Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad” (NYU Press, 2015), an edition and collaborative translation of a thirteenth-century biographical collection by the historian Ibn al-Sa‘i, sheds light on the lives of thirty-seven remarkable women. Edited collections include “The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on Islands and Islanders” (HTT, 2012), “The City That Never Sleeps: Poems of New York” (SUNY Press, 2014), “Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought” (Brill, 2017), “Arabic Belles Lettres” (Lockwood, 2019), and a forthcoming volume on the literary dimensions of the Qur’an (Edinburgh University Press). His most recent book, “The Devotional Qu’ran: Beloved Surahs and Verses” (Yale University Press, 2024), is the first curated English translation of Qur’anic surahs and passages central to Muslim devotion.
Toorawa is a director of the School of Abbasid Studies, a series editor of “Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies,” and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of several journals, including the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Quaderni di Studi Arabi. Since 2010, he has been an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, an initiative to edit and translate significant works of the premodern Arabic literary heritage.
Toorawa has been the recipient of numerous academic honors, including the Distinguished Senior Translation Fellowship from the Library of Arabic Literature, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at Independent Research Institutions, the Senior Long-term Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Rockefeller African Humanities Institute Junior Fellowship. In 2023–24, he was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.
Toorawa, who joined the Yale faculty in 2016, has served as chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, of the Yale-NUS College Advisory Committee, and of the Yale College Committee on Majors, and as a member of the Executive Committee for the Whitney Humanities Center, the Executive Committee for the Humanities Program, the Language Study Committee, the Review Committee for the Faculty, the Advisory Committees of several Yale College Certificates, and other bodies.
A dedicated teacher, Toorawa has also served as supervisor, reader, and examiner for numerous PhD students, and has brought to Yale his popular “Dr. T. Project” which meets weekly under the aegis of the Whitney Humanities Center, introducing students to diverse topics of literary, musical, and general cultural interest.
Toorawa went to the English School of Paris, the United World College of South East Asia, and earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.
