UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome professor Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed as of July 1, 2023. Ben Hammed is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and specializes in modern Arabic literature, with a particular focus on how pre-modern Islamic concepts of time negotiate postcolonial transformations within the region’s political economy.
Having attended University of Tunis with Arabic as his first language, Ben Hammed’s research explores literary and cinematic depictions of the rise of neoliberalism in Tunisia and Morocco, in addition to philosophical Sufism. His works have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Journal of North African Studies, Middle East Critique and Arab Studies Journal. He is currently preparing his latest manuscript, titled "Contesting the Empty Time of Modernity: Sufi Temporalities in Postcolonial Arabic Philosophy and Literature."
Ben Hammed earned his M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Notre Dame. He also holds his M.A. and M.Phil. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies (MESAAS) from Columbia University, where he also earned his Ph.D. in MESAAS and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion fellow. Most recently, he worked as a postdoctoral associate in Arabic cultural studies at Duke University.