Staff profile

I completed my BA in English Literature and Civilization at the University of Mouloud Mammeri, Tizi Ouzou, Algeria in 2013. In 2015, I graduated first in my cohort on an MA programme entitled The Culture and Media Studies of English Speaking Countries. My MA thesis explored Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist discourses in John Updike’s novel Terrorist (2006), a project that helped to lay the foundations for my doctorate. I began my PhD in the Department of English Studies in November 2016. Working under the supervision of Dr Samuel Thomas, my research compares the representation of Anarchist terrorism in literature of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century with contemporary representations of Islamist political violence. The analysis therefore ranges from writer such as Henry James, Frank Harris and G. K. Chesterton through to Mohsin Hamid, Sunjeev Sahota and Yasmina Khadra. It also engages with a variety of critical theorists and philosophers, paying particular attention to John Gray’s much-debated claim that the closest precursors to an organisation such as Al Qaeda are the revolutionary anarchists of late Nineteenth-Century Europe.