Scholarship & Translation
In May of 2020, I completed my PhD at Columbia University in Arabic literature and Middle Eastern History. My dissertation explores the transformations in Arabic narrative prose before and during the arrival of the European novel in the Middle East in the early nineteenth century. Most excitingly, my research has uncovered the first female protagonist in a nearly thousand-year-old literary genre – a topic I am currently recrafting into my second article. I would like my next writing project to be a collection of essays on the history of the modern Middle East, designed primarily for high school students. Below you’ll find information about my recent academic work as well as my literary translations.
Book-length Projects
Ahmad al-Barbir’s Maqamat: A Critical Edition in Arabic
Max Shmookler and Diaa al-Aswad
Orient Institut Beirut, forthcoming late 2022 / early 2023
This critical edition to be published in OIB’s Bibliotecha Islamica series is the first time that Ahmad al-Barbir’s 18th century maqama manuscript will be made available. The Arabic-language text is replete with notes and multiple indexes to help both native Arabic readers and advanced foreign students of Arabic literature and Middle Eastern Studies to navigate this elaborate, erudite, and complex literary text.
The Levantine Maqama Before the Nahda and Beyond the Novel
Max Shmookler
Doctoral Thesis, Columbia University, 2020
Set in and around the Ottoman provinces of Mount Lebanon, and spanning the period from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, my dissertation is a study of Arabic narrative forms and writing practices on the cusp of modernity. Through the study of four maqama collections composed between the 1770s and 1856, this project offers a microhistory of a literary form before and during its earliest encounter with the Nahḍa, or Arab renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century.
Available at: Comma Press | Amazon
The Book of Khartoum
Edited by Raph Cormack & Max Shmookler
Nestled on the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, the city of Khartoum has, for two centuries, been a focal point for both imperialism and rebellion, a breeding ground for revolutionary fervor, begrudging target for international criticism, and a refuge for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by wars conducted from this city. The Book of Khartoum provides a tour of this city through the eyes of 10 of its best authors, representing a wide array of literary schools and political stances; from the social realism of old Communist stalwarts, to the fantastical abstraction of a new generation of Sudanese writers.
The Book of Khartoum was awarded a 2015 PEN Translates award.
My translation of Bushra al-Fadil’s short story, “The Girl Whose Birds Flew Away,” in this collection was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2017.
Peer-reviewed Articles
Max Shmookler, “Each Nail a Jail: Kitab al-Masamir as Contemporary Critique” in Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (May 2021): 1-25.
Selected Scholarships & Awards
2018 | Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC), to support a year of dissertation research on Arabic manuscripts in Lebanon
Fall 2017 | Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship (Columbia), to support a semester of dissertation research (awarded again in Spring 2019)
2017 | Caine Prize for African Writing, a £10,000 prize awarded to my English translation of contemporary Sudanese author Bushra al-Fadil’s “The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away”
Summer 2017 | Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Columbia), for Arabic studies at the Subul al-Salam Institute in Fez, Morocco
2015 | PEN Translates Award, in recognition and support of The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press, 2016)
2009-2011 | Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship, full two-year scholarship to attend the Masters program in Near Eastern Studies at NYU
2007-2008 | CASA Fellowship, the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo
2006-2007 | Maguire Scholarship (Vassar College), year-long scholarship at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo
Other
“Adab in Its Own Terms: A Study of the Maqamat of Niqula al-Turk”, Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages, American University of Beirut, Nov 2016
“Translating an Aesthetic: Reflections on Sudanese Literature in English”, Warscapes (2014)
“Institutional and Critical Neglect as part of the Sudanese writer’s experience”, Arablit (2014)
“Biting their Mother Tongue: Three Sudanese Short Stories about Estrangement”, Words without Borders (2013)
