Najah Azzouzi, Ph.D.

Professor Najah Azzouzi teaches Arabic language, literature, and culture at CMC's department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Azzouzi works on 19^th and early-20^th-century Arabic literatures, particularly on the effect of French taste on elite and bourgeois Egyptian subjectivity as manifested in Arabic novels and magazines. She examines Nahda (Arab Renaissance) elite and middle-class identity as a product of European coloniality and the exchange relations and material conditions of modernity, and she shows how good French taste became the language of choice for expressing and measuring Arab Egyptian reform by many indigenous Egyptian Francophone intellectuals. Her work demonstrates how the Francophone (post)colonial subject develops and elaborates nationalistic reform formulas that are inseparable from elite class-oriented judgments and modes of being.