Department of Comparative Literature
Ghazouane Arslane, Tulane University

Ghazouane Arslane

Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature*

Education

Ph.D., Queen Mary University of London, UK

Biography

Ghazouane Arslane completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary University of London in 2020. Before joining Tulane University, Arslane worked as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Larbi Tebessi University in Algeria.

Scholarship 

Arslane’s research focuses the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics in modern and contemporary Arab literature (in Arabic, English and French), especially in relationship to classical Arabic and world literatures. He is also interested in modern Arab thought and intellectual history. His current research examines the narrative aesthetics and the question of memory, tradition and language in the Algerian and Maghrebi novel (mostly in Arabic, but also in French), probing the ways in which literature as an aesthetic discourse reimagines our ways of being, remembering and belonging and changes our perception of place.

Arslane’s first book, Gibran Khalil Gibran as Arab World Literature, was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2024. In it, Arslane situates the bilingual work of the Arab American writer within the contexts of the Arab Nahda or renaissance and global intellectual modernity. Closely reading and connecting his Arabic and Anglophone writings, the book examines Gibran’s multifarious oeuvre to reveal his creative and problematic embeddedness in modern debates concerning the nature and role of literature, religion, nationalism, evolutionism and more. It also historicizes and interrogates the reception of his work in the United States and the Arab world to understand why we have multiple functions of Gibran across different contexts, showing that there is much more to Gibran than his best-selling book The Prophet.

Arslane has also contributed essays, articles and translations to Journal of Arabic Literature, Life Writing, Philosophy East and West, and Asymptote.

Forthcoming Publications

  • “Multilingualism and Translation in the Maghrebi Arabic Novel,” Journal of World Literature (special issue on Multilingualisms, Fall 2025 - forthcoming)
  • “Reading as a Way of Seeing: Literature and the Perception of Place,” in New Readings in Literature as Moral Philosophy, edited by Grace Whistler (Bloomsbury Academic - forthcoming)

Selected Publications

  • “Rethinking Mahjar Literature and the Arab Nahḍah: Jubrān’s Critical Intervention,” Journal of Arabic Literature (2024: vol. 55, no. 2-3), 253-285. 
     
  • “(Re)collecting Myself in Arabic and English: Personal Reflections on Literature, Place, and Identity,” Life Writing (2022: vol 19, no. 04), 633-646.
  • “Arabic, American and/or World Literature: Kahlil Gibran’s Bilingualism and the Problem of Reception.” In Universal Localities: The Languages of World Literature. Edited by Galin Tihanov (J.B. Metzler, 2022), 73-95.
  • “Libraries, Learning, and Knowledge Production in Islamic History: An Interview with Nur Sobers-Khan,” Wasafiri vol 36, 2021 – no. 4: House of Wisdom: Libraries and Literatures of the Islam, 83-97.

Translations (from Arabic into English):

  • Abdelfattah Kilito, “Borges and the Blind.” Asymptote – issue: July 2022.
  • Fethi Meskini, “Nietzsche and the Last Pope: Changing the Paradigm, or the End of al-Millah (the Theologico-political Community,” Philosophy East and West (2022: vol 72, no 01), 193-165.

Other Publications

*Beginning January 2026