Gail Ramsay

Gail Ramsay is Professor of Arabic and areas of research include Arabic literature and society. Beginning with romantic writing and social criticism in modern Arabic literature, she has published widely on globalisation, cross-cultural writing and literary creativity in the Gulf region and analyzed Al-Jazeera’s debate program al-Ittijāh al-muʿākis (The Opposite Direction). Current research areas are Arabic blogging and ecology and environmental concern in Arabic literature.

• After Ph.D. studies in Arabic at the University of Michigan, 1990-91 and at Stockholm University 1991-96, Gail Ramsay received a Ph.D. in Arabic from Stockholm University.

• In 1997 she began teaching Arabic language and literature at Uppsala University where she received tenure as a university lecturer in 1998.

• While teaching Arabic at Uppsala and as part of a research team at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) in 2004, she conducted a discourse analysis of the debate program al-Ittijāh al-muʿākis (The Opposite Direction) on Al-Jazeera Arabic satellite-television.

• In 2006, her study “Globalisation and Cross-Cultural Writing in the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman” was published as part of an an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, titled Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective and emanating in four volumes.

• During 2009, she was responsible for the Middle East Program at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs (UI) and represented this institute at the Euro-Mediterranean Architectures roundtable talks of the European and Mediterranean Study Commission-European Institute of the Mediterranean (EuroMesco-IEMED) titled “Towards Convergent or Divergent Evolutions?” in Barcelona this year.

• Together with media professor Kristina Riegert, Stockholm University, she researched the Arabic blogosphere in a research project titled The Nature and Impact of the Arabic Blogosphere: What Kind of Publics?, funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2010-2012.

• Since 2013 Gail Ramsay has continued to conduct research on the Arabic blogosphere in Egypt the results of which will be published in March 2017, in her book Blogs & Literature & Activism: Popular Egyptian blogs and literature in touch.

• Since 2014 a new research interest is ecology and environmental concerns in Arabic literature. Together with Arabic professor Tetz Rooke, Gothenburg University, she is in the process of planning a research project with the preliminary title Arabic Literary Imaginaries in Environmental Humanities.

• Her article titled “Breaking the Silence of Nature in an Arabic Novel: Nazīf al-ḥajar by Ibrāhīm al-Kawnī” (2014, new impression 2016) is a result of Gail Ramsay's ecocritical research.