User:Chadibaggio

Humphrey Davies read Arabic at Cambridge in the UK,where he was awarded 1st class honors in the Arabic Tripos (1968). He has lived in the Arab world for most of his life thereafter, working in Palestine, Tunisia, Sudan and, above all, Egypt. His translations include works by Naguib Mahfouz (Thebes at War), Alaa Al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) and Elias Khoury (Gate of the Sun – forthcoming Harvill-Secker, November 2005) as well as classical texts. He resides in downtown Cairo and has just finished translating Ahmad El Aydi's novel Being Abbas El Abd (forthcoming American University in Cairo Press, 2006).

He was publications manager at the Adham Center, AUC. Davies' first contacts with AUC were in 1968-69, when he attended the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad. In 1972 he returned to join the team that produced the Hinds-Badawi Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic. Following the project, he pursued his studies in the United States and obtained a Ph.D. in Near East Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981, his dissertation dealing with the Egyptian Arabic of the 17th century. Subsequently he joined Save the Children Federation to work on community-based development in Gaza and later in Tunisia. He joined the Ford Foundation in 1990 as its representative in the Sudan and took over the Foundation's Middle East and North Africa regional office in Cairo in 1993. In 1997, Davies returned to scholarship, preparing a critical edition and translation of an Arabic text of the Ottoman period, Yusuf Al-Shirbini's Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf (Volume I forthcoming Peeters, Leuven, 2004). He joined the Adham Center in the fall of 2002 till 2005. Davies was the managing editor of Transnational Broadcasting Studies (TBS), the Adham Center's online journal dedicated to issues of satellite broadcasting in the Arab and Islamic worlds. He was also oversees all other publications of the Center. Now Davies working as a free lance translator.