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Brian T. Edwards is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Prior to moving to Tulane in 2018, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies (MENA).

Edwards's scholarly interests and research focus on three main areas: the intersections between culture and politics, how ideas and attitudes about foreign spaces are formed in relation to cultural representations, and how contemporary American culture circulates globally, with particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

Edwards is also an advocate for renewed approaches to language learning, at both university and K-12 levels, having written several op-eds on the topic and advanced language learning at both Tulane and Northwestern.

Academic Career
Edwards received his bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1990. He earned his master’s degree, his master of philosophy degree, and in 1998 his Ph.D., all in American Studies, from Yale.

He joined Northwestern in 2000, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies for the English PhD program from September 2009 to August 2012. He was also a core faculty member in comparative literary studies and international studies. He was also a faculty affiliate of the American studies program, the program of African Studies, Screen Cultures, Rhetoric and Public Culture, and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.

In 2011, Edwards founded and became the Director of the Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) program at Northwestern. Under Edwards’ direction, MENA grew from a small faculty working group to an internationally recognized program with 20 core and language faculty and 13 affiliates, offering an undergraduate major and minor, curricula in Middle Eastern languages and an interdisciplinary PhD certificate. MENA also hosts acclaimed writers and filmmakers, while creating extensive programming on campus and in the community.

In 2015, he became Crown Professor in Middle East Studies in addition to becoming full Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern.

From 2016 to 2017, Edwards served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on Language Learning, which was charged by Congress to examine language education in the U.S. and make recommendations for ways to meet the nation’s future education needs.

As of July 1, 2018, Edwards is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, where he oversees 34 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts—including 60 undergraduate majors and two dozen M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. programs—plus the Shakespeare Festival, Summer Lyric Theatre, Carroll Gallery, Tulane Marching Band, and the Middle America Research Institute.

Awards and Honors
Edwards was named a 2005 Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York under their Islam Initiative, a 2008 New Directions Fellow by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and a Class of 2015 Emerging Leader by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Publications
Edwards's first book, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke University Press, 2005), is a cultural history of how Americans came to think about the Arab world during the period when the U.S. was rising to global superpower status, and how Moroccans responded. His latest book, After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016), examines the paradox of the popularity of American culture, especially digital culture, in the Middle East during the 21st century, while attitudes toward the U.S. were plummeting in the region.

a cultural history of how Americans came to think about the Arab world during the period when the U.S. was rising to global superpower status, and how Moroccans responded; and which examines the paradox of the popularity of American culture, especially digital culture, in the Middle East during the 21st century, while attitudes toward the U.S. were plummeting in the region.

He is coeditor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of the volume Globalizing American Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which emerged from a multi-year project he directed at Northwestern, and editor of On the Ground: New Directions in Middle East and North African Studies (NU-Q, 2013).

Edwards has also published essays, articles, and op-eds in a wide range of publications, both scholarly and mainstream, including Public Culture, American Literary History, Salon, Arizona Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Chicago Tribune, Journal of North African Studies, Foreign Policy, The Hill, and many others.

Personal Life
Edwards is married to Kate Baldwin, a professor of English with joint appointments in the Department of Communication and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Tulane University.