Brian T. Edwards

Brian T. Edwards serves as dean of the School of Liberal Arts, where since 2018 he has led the largest of Tulane’s nine schools, encompassing 35 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, fine and performing arts. The School has more than 425 faculty members and offers 60 undergraduate majors, two dozen graduate programs (MA, MFA, and PhD), and approximately 1,100 courses per semester. Dean Edwards also oversees a portfolio of research centers, arts programs, and professional theatre companies, including the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival, the Summer Lyric Theatre, Tulane University Marching Band, the Carroll Gallery, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and the Middle American Research Institute. He holds a joint faculty appointment as Professor of English and Professor of Middle East & North African Studies.

Prior to moving to New Orleans, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University for nearly two decades, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies (MENA), which grew under his direction from a small faculty working group to a nationally recognized program. In 2013, he was named an “Emerging Leader” by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs for this work.

At Tulane, he has overseen a transformative period in the School of Liberal Arts. He has developed and led a strategy built around a global perspective on the liberal arts; profound engagement with city, community, and region; deep commitments to diversity, equity and belonging; and a firm belief that an undergraduate liberal arts education is the best preparation for the careers and challenges of the future. Under his leadership, the School has undertaken historic amounts of faculty hiring across its three divisions, with a renewed approach to equitable search practices. He has focused on expanding Tulane’s vibrant interdisciplinary programs in Environmental Studies, Africana Studies, Asian Studies, and Digital Media Practices, and built innovative and successful programs and centers, establishing during his tenure programs in Strategy, Leadership and Analytics (Tulane’s most popular minor); Native American and Indigenous Studies; Middle East & North African Studies; the Grant Center for American Jewish Experience; the Boudreaux Great Writers Series; and the Tulane Global Humanities Research Center. He has also been committed to partnerships with the Schools of Science and Engineering, Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and Medicine, and has collaborated with his fellow deans to create dynamic programs such as the Flowerree Symposium on climate change and science-based public policy, the STEM² Studies Program, and Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

Edwards is an advocate for global education, including renewed approaches to language learning at both the university and K-12 levels. A speaker of four languages himself, he led language initiatives at Northwestern in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. In 2016-17, he served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on Language Learning, which was charged by a bipartisan group of members of Congress to examine language education in the U.S. and make recommendations for ways to meet the nation’s future education needs. At Tulane, he has built on this commitment, appointing Tulane’s first Associate Dean for Language Initiatives, developing a strategy for deploying languages across the curriculum, and introducing courses in Choctaw and Vietnamese for heritage speakers to connect to local communities.

As a scholar, Edwards examines the intersections between culture and politics and the ways in which contemporary American culture circulates globally. He has done extensive field research in Morocco, Egypt, and Iran, and is the author of two books: Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke, 2005), a cultural history of how Americans came to think about the Arab world during the period when the U.S. was rising to global superpower status; and After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia, 2016), which examines the creativity of young Arabs and Iranians during a dramatic and transitional period in global history and explores the paradox of the popularity of American culture in the Middle East while attitudes toward the U.S. were plummeting in the region. He is coeditor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of the volume Globalizing American Studies (U Chicago, 2010), which emerged from a multiyear project he directed at Northwestern and significantly reoriented discussions in the field. He is also editor of On the Ground: New Directions in Middle East and North African Studies (NU-Q, 2013), and a special portfolio of the NYC literary journal A Public Space dedicated to new Egyptian writing on the precipice of the Tahrir uprisings, introducing to the U.S. public a number of prominent authors via new translations.

Edwards has published essays, articles, and Op-Eds in a wide range of publications, both scholarly and mainstream, including Public Culture, American Literary History, PMLA, Arizona Quarterly, NOVEL, Journal of North African Studies, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Sewanee Review, Foreign Policy, The Hill and many others. He has lectured extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, and his research has been supported by major grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.

His new research pursues three avenues. He leads a multisited project on global port cities, with the collaboration of a group of scholars, curators, and artist-activists based on four continents. He is also writing a book about Tangier in the 1990s—part-memoir, part-critical biography of Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri. And he is developing a series of essays on the liberal arts for a post-pandemic digital age.

Edwards was educated at Yale University, where he received his BA in English, magna cum laude, and his MA, MPhil, and PhD, all in American Studies.

Learn more about Dean Edwards’s global humanities initiatives: https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/globalhumanities

Learn more about Dean Edwards’s research, writing, and current projects at https://briantedwards.com/

To contact or schedule Dean Edwards, please email Joseph Mistrot at jmistrot@tulane.edu.