Draft:Reham Hosny

Reham Hosny is an Arab electronic literature writer and academic researcher specializing in digital literature. Her work is devoted to building links between Western electronic literature communities and growing digital culture and literature communities in underrepresented areas.

Life and Career
Hosny currently lectures at Minia University, Egypt.

She spent two years as a visiting scholar at College of Liberal Arts at RIT-New York and West Virginia University.

The British Academy and University of Cambridge is sponsoring Hosny's fellowship research, “Locked Up for Reading a Poem”: AI Poetics of Disguise and Literary Activism in the Arab World, which is exploring ways to use artificial intelligence frameworks for expressing political opinions "without risking their lives."

Community work
In 2015, Hosny helped launch arabicelit, a website to collate data on Arabic electronic literature writers. She has helped organized conferences, including the first Arabic E-Lit Conference (Dubia Feb 25-27, 2018)  .Hosny has been a member of the Electronic Literature Organization Board since 2021.

She directs the Arabic Electronic Literature Research Group.

In her 2018 essay, "Mapping Electronic Literature in the Arabic Context" in the Electronic Book Review, Hosny explores digital literature terminology and Arab culture, making a case for Arab literature inclusion into the Electronic Literature Collections. She then became a an international consultant for the Electronic Literature Collection 4, which now contains four works marked with the keywords Arabic.

Academic Articles

In 2017, Hosny conducted a review of teaching electronic literature in Arabic Universities in her Hyperrhiz essay, "E-Lit in Arabic Universities: Status Quo and Challenges." Hosny explored the print progenitors of electronic literature within Arabic literature in her essay and talk at the ELO 2017 conference July 18-22 in Porto, Portugal, “Roots and Shoots: History and Development of Arabic Electronic Literature.” She parlays this exploration into a deep dive in defining what electronic literature is in her 2023 Electronic Book Review essay, "Classifying the Unclassifiable: Genres of Electronic Literature."

Her chapter in the 2023 work, Global Perspectives on Digital Literature, "Between Two Screens" explores the January 25th Revolution in Egypt.

Creative Works

Al-Barrah (The Announcer) , written in collaboration with Mohamed Nasef (2019 – 2021the first Arabic augmented reality and hologram novel) combines augmented reality and holograms as part of the work.

Awards and Honors
She received the Ihsan Abdel Quddous Literary Prize for short story writing for her short story collection Amma Ba’d (English translation: and thereafter) (2012).

Al-Barrah received the 2022 Robert Coover Award Honorable mention.