Brian T. Edwards

Brian T. Edwards is an associate professor of English & Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in American studies at Yale University, where he also received his B.A.

His fields of study include comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and American studies. At Northwestern, he has taught on a range of topics including comparative orientalisms, cold war culture, representations of World War II, globalization, and diaspora. In addition to teaching and writing, Edwards directs the Globalizing American Studies Project and is currently editing a collection of essays on the subject with Dilip Gaonkar, to be published in 2009. He also a member of the Editorial Collective of Public Culture.

His recent work has focused on the experience of American culture in an international context, especially North Africa and the Middle East. He was also a Fulbright fellow in Morocco and specializes on Maghrebi literature and culture, particularly its intersections with American culture and politics. In 2005, Duke University Press published "Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express", an engagement of the role the Maghreb played in American orientalist imagination prior to its turning to the Middle East for an understanding of "the Arab". He reads a broad range of cultural productions, including literature, film, journalism, anthropology, and history on the matter to offer interesting possibilities in the study of American empire and its complex relationships to culture and the subject population. His next book project is entitled "After the American Century" and seeks to examine the circulation of American culture in contemporary North Africa and the Middle East.

External links

* [http://www.english.northwestern.edu/people/edwards.html Faculty profile from Northwestern University]