Allison Y. Gibeily is a PhD candidate in English and a cluster fellow in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. She studies Arabic travel writing and oral literary forms developed by merchants, monks, and other travelers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bilād al-Shām. Her research has been supported by a number of institutions, including the Gotha Research Centre, the Modern Language Association, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. She is also an assistant editor for the Journal of Arabic Literature.

Research Project

Between Enlightenment: Arabic Travel Literature, Embodiment, and the Global Eighteenth Century (1707-1898)

Allison’s dissertation, “Between Enlightenment: Arabic Travel Literature, Embodiment, and the Global Eighteenth Century (1707-1898),” proposes an alternative trajectory for the emergence of modern Arabic literature and global eighteenth-century culture by demonstrating the central importance of post-classical Arabic travel writing (riḥla) penned by minor merchant-class authors. Writing in a dialect-based register known as middle Arabic, which included significant grammatical and orthographic variation, these writers tend to be excluded from narratives of cultural revival both in the context of the contemporaneous European Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century Arab Nahḍa. Yet they held substantial economic and cultural influence in their own time. By studying not only the contents of rare Arabic manuscripts from this period but also the epistemological and formal methods with which their authors composed them, Allison’s research aims to reframe post-classical travelogues as hybrid works of literature that require attention to the embodied and often improvisational experiences of reading, writing, and listening. Ultimately, her project aims to expand existing definitions of world literature by accounting for divergent Arabic literary aesthetics and situating them in relation to adab, a concept whose translations include both written knowledge and unwritten, socially embedded knowhow.