Over the decades that followed, English studies in Egypt would become not simply an academic discipline, but a contested intellectual space, shaped by debates over authority, knowledge, and Egypt’s place in the world.
This year, the department marked its centenary, celebrating a legacy that includes some of Egypt’s most influential intellectuals and cultural figures, among them Louis Awad, Mohamed Anani, Latifa El-Zayyat, Rashad Rouchdi, Mohamed Salmawi, and Radwa Ashour. To mark the occasion, it hosted its sixth annual conference on comparative literature under the title: A Century of English Studies in the Global South–Impacts on Research and Society.
In their opening remarks, Mahmoud El-Said, Deputy Chair of Cairo University, and Nagla Rafat, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, described the department as an intellectual arena that has long encouraged debate on questions central to Egyptian society and national life.
Yet the origins of English studies at Cairo University predate the department itself. As Hoda Al-Sadda, professor at the department, recalled, the teaching of English began as early as 1911, when British author Percy White was appointed to teach the language at what was then Fouad I University. This was before the Ministry of Education formally assumed control of the institution and established its various academic departments, including English language and literature.
The moment was politically and culturally charged.
Culturally, Egypt was witnessing a struggle between the English and French languages over linguistic and intellectual dominance in education, including at the university level. Politically, resentment toward British occupation was intensifying, and debates over language could not be disentangled from questions of sovereignty and power.
In Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (1990), American historian Donald Malcolm Reid documents how this competition extended well beyond the classroom, involving the Egyptian monarch, British and French diplomats, and leading Egyptian intellectuals, all invested in shaping the direction of higher education.
According to Al-Sadda, it was British professors who laid down the department’s early institutional structures and teaching methods, modelled closely on those used at Oxford and Cambridge. But this structure also entrenched exclusion.
“Until 1951, Egyptians who held a Phd in English literature were not [eastily] allowed to teach at the department,” Al-Sadda said. With teaching monopolized by British staff, she added, many Egyptian students found little intellectual inspiration in the programme.
That dynamic shifted decisively in 1950, when Taha Hussein became minister of education. Hussein terminated the contracts of British professors and appointed Egyptians to take over the department’s teaching roles—a move that would reshape English studies in Egypt.
This decision paved the way for Louis Awad, an alumnus of Cairo University who later studied at Cambridge and Princeton, to become the department’s first Egyptian head. According to Amin Al-Aayouti, professor of English literature, Hussein’s intervention amounted to “a nationalization” of the department, which had first admitted students on 11 March 1925.
Over the following decades, the department evolved into a space where the study of English literature was increasingly tied to questions of identity, power, and global engagement. Shereen Abouelnaga, the department’s current head, said it consistently functioned as a platform that enabled students to engage critically with the world and to interrogate Egypt’s relationship to it.
“It was essentially about adopting a method of critical thinking,” she said.
Abouelnaga credited the department’s first generation of Egyptian professors—among them the novelist and feminist Latifa El-Zayyat—with embedding this ethos.
“In this department, we are here to take our students out of their comfort zone and to help them rethink things at large,” she said. “We are not telling students what to think; we are helping them to decide for themselves what to think through the studies and texts we are teaching.”
As faculty members continue to emphasize, the department’s mission today is not merely academic continuity but intellectual openness: to consolidate its role as a free critical platform in the global south, where language becomes not a marker of domination, but a tool for questioning it.
*A version of this story was published in Al-Ahram daily
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