Ahmed Honeini

(MENAFN- The Conversation)

• Honorary Research Associate in American Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

Profile Articles

My primary research interests are:

American literature, drama, and cinema (1900-present), with an emphasis on William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Southern literature;
Modernism, postmodernism, and transgressive fiction;
Thanatology, death, and violence studies;
Gender and sexuality studies.
I also have strong secondary research interests in the following areas:

The history of the novel, from Defoe to the present;
The European reception of twentieth century American literature;
Representations of New York City in fiction, theatre, and film;
American video games;
William Shakespeare; Edgar Allan Poe; Herman Melville; Joseph Conrad; James Joyce; T. S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Federico García Lorca; Ernest Hemingway; Flannery O'Connor; William S. Burroughs; Arthur Miller; Sidney Lumet; el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X); Stanley Kubrick; Joe Orton; Cormac McCarthy; Richard Brautigan; David Cronenberg; Stephen King; Tracy Letts; Paul Thomas Anderson; and Sarah Kane.
I am the author of two monographs: William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound (Routledge, 2021), and Tennessee Williams's America: Homes, Families, Exiles (Routledge, 2025). Tennessee Williams's America was supported by an Authors' Foundation grant from the Society of Authors.

I am currently working on two new major projects: a short-form study of socio-political and religious martyrdom in James Baldwin's dramatic works (provisionally entitled James Baldwin Between Stage and Screen: The Politics of Sacrifice), and a monograph on diminished stardom and fame from the beginnings of American cinema to the present day.

I am also writing a quartet of essays exploring comparisons and confluences between Faulkner and a number of American and European writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Vladimir Nabokov. The first of these, on Faulkner, Hemingway, and World War One, has been published in The Mississippi Quarterly (72.4, 2020). The second of these, on Faulkner, Nabokov, and Lolita, was published in a special issue of The Faulkner Journal on postmodernist literature and transgressive fiction and which I guest edited. The third, on Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and "Annabel Lee," will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays focussing on Faulkner Studies in France. The final essay in the series will compare representations of disability and sibling relations in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Conrad's The Secret Agent.

Alongside these publications, my account of the current state of European Faulkner Studies was published in a special issue of The Southern Quarterly focussing on Southern Studies in Europe (59.3, December 2022). I have also contributed chapters on Child of God to the edited collection The Evolving Character of Cormac McCarthy (Louisiana State University Press, 2024) and This Side of Paradise to the Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2025). I have been invited to contribute a chapter on Cormac McCarthy and Rockstar Games's Red Dead videogame series to an edited collection celebrating the 40th anniversary of Blood Meridian, and a chapter focussing on puritanism, decadence, and violence in Tennessee Williams in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic.

I am the founder of Faulkner Studies in the UK, a research network devoted to Faulkner established in 2017. Follow us on Twitter, (@Faulkner_UK), on Bluesky (@faulknerstudiesuk), and on Facebook (@FaulknerUK).

I am an elected Executive Council member of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (2026-2028).

Finally, I have been consulted for my expertise in American literature and culture by such media outlets as The Conversation, Refinery29, and Five Books.

Experience

• –present Honorary Research Associate in American Literature, Royal Holloway University of London

Education

• 2019 Royal Holloway, University of London, PhD

Honours

Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

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