About

Shaden M. Tageldin is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature and Morse-Alumni Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. From 2014–2018, she was founding director of the African Studies Initiative, a Title VI African Studies National Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education at the University of Minnesota, and from 2013–2015, director of graduate studies for the doctoral programs in Comparative Literature and in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society as well as the interdepartmental graduate minor in Moving Image Studies. Tageldin is the recipient of a 2022–2023 Horace T. Morse–University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education and a 2013–2014 Arthur “Red” Motley Exemplary Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Tageldin earned her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2011), was awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2013 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), and her essay “Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Sibāʿī, and the Translations of ‘Religion’ in British Egypt,” PMLA 126.1 (2011), the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Essay Prize.  Tageldin’s latest publication, “Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī’s Poetics of Comparative Literature,” appears in PMLA 138.3 (May 2023), in a special issue on Translation; another essay, “Tarjamah: Negative Translation,” is forthcoming in PMLA 139.1 (January 2024) in a Theories and Methodologies special feature titled “An Arabic Theoretical Lexicon.”  Her recent publications include “World Literature, World War: Revisiting Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” in Vol. 5a of A Companion to World Literature, ed. B. Venkat Mani and Ken Seigneurie (John Wiley & Sons, 2020); “Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia,” in Journal of World Literature 4.3 (2019); “Beyond Latinity, Can the Vernacular Speak?”, in Comparative Literature 70.2 (2018); “Untranslatability,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K. Heise et al. (Routledge, 2017; revised from this version, published online in 2014); and translations of the work of Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār and ʿAlī Mubārak, in the Modern Language Association (MLA) volume The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda, ed. Tarek El-Ariss (2018).

Other essays include “Fénelon’s Gods, al-Ṭahṭāwī’s Jinn: Trans-Mediterranean Fictionalities,” in Philological Encounters 2.1–2 (2017; appeared online 2016), which won the honorable mention for the INCS Richard Stein Essay Prize and the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize; “The Novel in Translation and Transition,” in Volume 11 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi (Oxford University Press, 2016); and “(Post)Colonial Translation,” in Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Routledge, 2016); “The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond,” in the Journal of Historical Sociology (2014); “The Incestuous (Post)Colonial: Soueif’s Map of Love and the Second Birth of the Egyptian Novel in English,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); “Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Nahḍah in U.S. Comparative Literary Studies,” in the Journal of Arabic Literature (2012); “Mahfouz’s Posts,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, ed. Waïl S. Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj (MLA, 2012); “The Returns of Theory,” in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2011); and “One Comparative Literature? ‘Birth’ of a Discipline in French-Egyptian Translation, 1810–1834,” in Comparative Literature Studies (2010).

Tageldin currently is completing a second book, provisionally titled Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature. Her work on that project was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, which she held in 2019, and a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies, which she held in 2016–2017 at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.   Among other awards, she received the ACLA’s 2005 Charles Bernheimer Prize for best dissertation in comparative literature and has held past fellowships and grants from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar program; the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tageldin is currently senior editor and member of the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford University Press), as well as a member of the editorial board of Comparative Literature and the editorial advisory boards of Comparative Literature Studies and the Journal of Arabic Literature; she also has served on the editorial board of Philological Encounters and as a member of the Zukunftsphilologie Collegium, sponsored by the Berlin-based research program Forum Transregionale Studium. In 2017, she was vice chair of the Association of African Studies Programs. In the MLA, she has served as chair of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2017–Jan. 2018), co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (2013–2015), chair of the executive committee of the Discussion Group on Arabic Literature and Culture (2008–Jan. 2009, now LLC Arabic Forum), secretary of the executive committee of the CLCS Global Arab and Arab American Forum (2017–Jan. 2018), and divisional delegate to the Delegate Assembly (2012–2015).