The External Advisory Board meets annually to review Faculty Fellowship proposals and to select the Faculty Fellows for the next academic year.
Emily Greenwood
Professor of the Classics and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where she gained her BA, M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees. After finishing her Ph.D. she was a research fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2002). Since then, she has held academic appointments at the University of St Andrews (as a lecturer in Greek, 2002–2008), Yale (as a Professor of Classics with a secondary appointment in African-American Studies, 2009-2021), and Princeton (as a Professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values, 2021-2022). She joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2022.
Her research interests include Greek prose literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, classical receptions from the nineteenth century to the present day, Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. She has published two books: Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010), joint winner of the 2011 Runciman Award, and Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006). She has co-edited two volumes, Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (with Barbara Graziosi), and Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (with Elizabeth Irwin).
She has two book projects: Black Classicisms and the Expansion of the Western Classical Tradition, and The Recovery of Loss: Classics and the Erasure of American Histories. She is guest editor for a two-volume special issue of the American Journal of Philology on the theme of “Diversifying Classical Philology” (AJP issues 143.2 and 143.4).
Heather K. Love
Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Heather Love received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press), and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines") and Literary Studies and Human Flourishing (with James English; New York: Oxford University Press). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies.
She is currently working on a new project, To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Queer Criticism (Under contract, University of Chicago Press), and has translated select essays and lectures.
Judith Surkis
Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Judith Surkis specializes in the history of France and the French Empire, North Africa, and gender, intellectual, and legal history.
She is currently writing The Intimate Life of International Law, which examines how international family law conflicts between France and Algeria tested the boundaries of postcolonial sovereignty and shaped debates about immigration, secularism, feminism, race and Islam across the Mediterranean. An article drawn from that work, “Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962-1992” published in the Journal of Modern History won the Koren Prize (Best Article in French History in 2022) from the Society for French Historical Studies and the 2024 Chester Penn Higby Prize.
Her previous book, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria 1830-1930 (Cornell, 2019) won the 2020 book prize by the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies. She is also the author of Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell, 2006) as well as articles that have appeared in the American Historical Review, Public Culture, History and Theory, and History of the Present.
Shawkat M. Toorawa
Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University
Shawkat Toorawa received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has previously taught at Cornell University, the University of Mauritius, and Duke University. He has also worked in his family’s import/export companies in Malaysia and Mauritius.
Toorawa writes, thinks, and teaches about the Arabic writerly culture of Abbasid Baghdad; the Qur’an, in particular rhyme-words, hapaxes, and translation; the Indian Ocean, especially the Waqwaq Tree, and the Kreol literature of Mauritius; modern poetry; translation; and science fiction.
His books include Interpreting the Self, co-authored with the academic alliance RRAALL, on autobiography in the Arabic literary tradition; Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture, a study of the ninth-century bookman Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur; A Time Between Ashes and Roses, a critical edition and translation of a collection of long poems by the Syro-Lebanese poet, Adonis; a co-edited reference work, Arabic Literary Culture, 500–925; Consorts of the Caliphs, an edition and collaborative translation of Ibn al-Sa‘i’s 13th-century collection of women’s biographies; The City That Never Sleeps, an edited anthology of poetry about New York; and The Devotional Qur’an, a translated selection of beloved surahs and verses. An edited collection on the literary dimensions of the Qur’an is forthcoming.
He is a Director of the School of Abbasid Studies and was from 2010 to 2025 an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature. He is on the boards of several journals, including the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, and Quaderni di Studi Arabi. He is joint series editor of Lockwood Press’s Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and of De Gruyter Brill’s IQSA Studies on the Qur’an.