Elliott Colla

Elliott Colla is an American scholar of the Middle East, specializing in Arabic literature and culture.^[1] He is an associate professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and leads the Reading Palestine book club at Lost City Books.^[2]

Elliott Colla
Elliott Colla
Occupation	Associate Professor
Nationality	American
Subject	Middle East
Notable works	Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity

Career

Colla received a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Comparative literature from Berkeley in 2000.^[3] His translation of Gold Dust was runner-up for the Banipal Prize in 2009.^[4] He is a co-editor of the e-zine, Jadaliyya.^[5] In addition to translations and academic works, he has published a novel Baghdad Central (2014). This was adapted as a television series of the same name, released in 2020.^[6]

Books

• Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Baghdad Central London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2014.

Translations

• Ibrahim Aslan - The Heron
• Idris Ali - Poor
• Ibrahim al-Koni - Gold Dust
• Rabai Madhoun - The Lady from Tel Aviv^[7]

Further reading

• Looking for the Three of Diamonds Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine MERIP.
• "The Poetry of Revolt", jadaliyya e-zine.
• The People Want Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine MERIP.
• The Persistence of Jokes jadaliyya e-zine.
• Walls jadaliyya e-zine.
• "The Poetry of Revolt” in the New Egypt Radio Open Source.

See also

• List of Arabic-English translators