My name is Rasoul Aliakbari. I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. Albiblio is part of my ongoing doctoral dissertation. My doctoral project is a study of print cultures of the Arabian Nights / One Thousand and One Nights and their utilization in nation-state building enterprises in British, American, Egyptian, and Iranian contexts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have taught, researched, presented and published on English, Farsi, and world literatures.

Select awards, scholarships, and grants:

2015-2016 University of Alberta State of Kuwait Doctoral Award in Islamic Studies ($7000)

March 2015 University of Montreal Comparative Literature Students’ Tribune Travel Grant

Dec. 2014 University of Alberta GSA Professional Development Award ($500)

April 2013 University of Alberta Office of Interdisciplinary Studies Operating-Funded Assistantship ($1000)

Jan. 2013 University of Alberta GSA Professional Development Award ($500)

2012-2013 University of Alberta Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship ($20,000)

Dec. 2010 University of Tehran Conference Travel Grant ($400)

March 2012 Iran’s National Talents Foundation Conference Travel Grant ($700)

March 2011 Iran’s National Talents Foundation Conference Travel Grant ($700)

Forthcoming panel:

Print, Public Readership, and Alternative Literary Modernities at CCLA 🍁 ACLC @ Congress 2016, Canada

Highlights of publications: 

“Iranian Literary Modernity, Critical Regionalism, and Print Culture of The Thousand and One Nights.” Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus. Eds. Siavash Saffari, Roxana Akhbari, Kara Abdolmaleki, and Evelyn Hamdon. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Forthcoming Fall 2016.

Highlights of presentations and talks: 

“Poetics of Nation-building and the Thousand and One Nights: Toward a Revisionist Account of Anglo-American Nation-State Formation.” The Thousand and One Nights: Sources, Transformations, and Relationship with Literature, the Arts and the Sciences II, INALCO, France. 8-12 December 2015. Conference Presentation.

“Aesthetic Capital of the Arabian Nights and the American Capitalist Formation: Toward Re-­Historicizing Anglo­-American Nation ­Building through Print Culture.” Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences 2015, University of Ottawa, Canada. May 31- June 2 2015. Conference Presentation.

“Jayegah e Hezar-o Yek Shab Dar Adabyat-e Jahan” [A Survey of One Thousand and One Nights in World Literature]. University of Alberta Anjoman Andisheh [Iranian Society of Thought at the University of Alberta], Edmonton, Canada. 5 February 2015. [Persian talk].

“Critical Transverism: A Creative Approach to Comparative Literature ‘in Crisis.’” Tribune des étudiant(e)s en Littérature Comparée/Comparative Literature Students’ Tribune, University of Montreal, Canada. 16 January 2015. Conference Presentation.

“Orientalization of the Occident: A Study of the Politics of Journey Rituals in The Marble Faun by Nathaniel  Hawthorne.” 2013 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, University of Toronto, Canada. 5-7 April 2013. Conference Presentation.

“Fictions of Phantasmagoria: A Postcolonial Reading of William Beckford’s Vathek.” XIth International Language, Literature, and Stylistics Symposium, Sakarya University, Istanbul, Turkey. 13 October 2011. Conference Presentation.

Highlights of employment:

Fall 2014 and Fall 2015 Instructor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta

Jan-April 2015 Editorial Assistant of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta

Fall 2013-present Tutor of Academic English Writing at Centre for Writers at the University of Alberta.