HUMS 206, The Arabian Nights, Then and Now

Meeting Time: 
TTh 1-2:15

Course Description:

Exploration of Arabian Nights, a classic of world literature. Topics include antecedents, themes and later prose, and graphic and film adaptations.

Led by:

Robyn Creswell's picture

Professor Robyn Creswell

I joined the Comparative Literature Department at Yale in 2014, after teaching two years at Brown University. I’ve taught courses on modern Arabic literature, the practice of literary translation, art and revolution, and modernist poetry (in French, English, Spanish, and Arabic). I am the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (PUP, 2019), a study of the modernist poetry movement in Arabic and its Cold War context.

In 2012, I was a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, where I worked on a translation of the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s early masterpiece, That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013). I have also translated the Moroccan critic and fabulist Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010) and The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2015), both from the French.

In addition to my scholarship, I regularly publish works of criticism in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. For this work, I received the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism in 2013. I have been a fellow at the NYPL’s Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. I was poetry editor of The Paris Review from 2011-2018.

My current project is an intellectual history of the Arab world after WWII, told through the lives and works of its poets.