Rebecca Carol Johnson

Professor Johnson is a scholar of comparative literature with a specialization in modern Arabic literature and literary culture. Her research focuses on literary exchanges between Arabic and European languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history and theory of the novel, and studies of transnational literary circulation and translation.

Prof. Johnson is now at work on "Visionary Politics: Revolutionary Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of the Arab Avant-Garde," which looks to the history of contemporary Arab literary styles since the 1960s. Similarly based on cross-linguistic exchanges, this book investigates experimental Arabic literature and art and their revolutionary attempts to envision alternative political futures throughout the decades-long transition from decolonization to globalization.