An Egyptian literary scholar, university professor of modern Arabic and founding director of the Center for Translation at the American University in Cairo, before which she taught at Cornell University from 1984-1990 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. She has published numerous articles in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial literature, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is currently working with a group of scholars on an edited volume titled Translation, Gender and Knowledge Production. In 2012, she edited “Translating Egypt’s Revolution; The Language of Tahrir”, an interdisciplinary collective project conducted by AUC students, and described as a unique interpretation of Egypt’s revolution through the analysis of language usage during the protests, in various forms - the written, the sung, and the spoken word - across a variety of media.