Brian T. Edwards is associate professor of English, comparative literature, and American studies at Northwestern University, where he directs the Globalizing American Studies Project and co-chairs the Middle East and North African Studies Working Group. He has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad on the interplay of politics and culture, including in Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. Edwards is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke University Press, 2005), which examines the ways in which Americans came to form opinions about the Arab world via cinema, media and literature – from the North African campaign during WWII through the hippie invasion of Marrakech during the late 1960s-- as well as numerous articles in trade and scholarly publications including Foreign Policy, Chicago Tribune, The Believer, Public Culture, Journal of North African Studies, and others.

A former Fulbright scholar to Morocco, he will travel to Cairo in spring 2009 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist to help develop American Studies programs at Cairo University, Giza. He is currently writing a book entitled After the American Century: American Culture in Middle Eastern Circulation, which examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in contemporary North Africa and the Middle East, and the ways in which young Moroccans, Egyptians and Iranians interpret and remake American cultural products. For this work, he was named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of N.Y., as part of their initiative on the Muslim world. During 2008-09, he is a New Directions Fellow, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Website: http://www.english.northwestern.edu/people/edwards.html .

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