Ayman A. El-Desouky is Chair of Comparative Literature at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and formerly Founding Chair of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS, 2009-2012), SOAS, University of London. He has studied comparative literature, literary theory and modern philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and taught at Johns Hopkins and Harvard before relocating to the UK in 2002. Engaging with the recent theoretical debates in comparative literature, El-Desouky’s work turns to issues of critical hermeneutics and the untranslatability of conceptual languages in a series of studies that range from literary approaches to the Qur’an and kerygmatic theologies to the aesthetics and politics of emergent collective subjectivities. Following on from his work on the intellectual and the people (2014), he is currently engaged in two research projects on Figuring the Sacred in the Modern Arabic Novel and Questions of Untranslatability: Toward a Comparative Critical Method.