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In this piece, I reflect on my teaching practice and provide as an example of curriculum development and teaching and learning innovation in my field. As an interdisciplinary tutor, who is also in charge of delivering the Arabic Electives Pathway programme (Arabic as a minor in certain degree options), I have been implementing extracurricular activities that help advance my Arabic students’ grasp of the language through using what they have learnt to access various cultural inputs in Arabic beyond the official curriculum. In what follows, I reflect on the practice, which has proven very popular with the students; I also suggest expanding it through creating a new interdisciplinary elective module about the Middle East, which would be open to final-year interested students in the Humanities and would be taught in English. There would, however, be an extra option to access some of the materials in Arabic for the Advanced (final-year) Arabic Pathway students, who opt to take the module.

I was invited to give the keynote lecture at the Postcolonial/World Literature Postgraduate Study Day, which is organised by the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research at Lancaster University in May 2017. The lecture explored the concept of transcultural writing in Europe and the Middle East and compared the oeuvres of three transcultural authors and travel writers: Sir Richard Burton, TE Lawrence and Kahlil Gibran.

This thesis examines certain narratives in Richard Burton’s and T.E. Lawrence’s encounters with the Arab East. By juxtaposing both Orientalists’ accounts of Arab sexuality with the changes that had been taking place in Arabic literary and cultural discourse of the time, I highlight what appears to be a disparity in representation. Nonetheless, I argue that this disparity stems from a perception of ‘difference’ that characterises the relationship between East and West. This perception of ‘difference’ is further explored in the writings of Arab scholars on European culture since the beginning of the Euro-­‐Arab encounter in the nineteenth century.\ud \ud I expose the epistemological bases of this modern encounter and situate it within the political changes that had been shaping the emerging Middle East on the eve of modernity. Burton and Lawrence are also situated within this context. I show how their Orientalist discourse involved a process of conflating ‘text’ and ‘experience’ while interacting with the Arab East. This conflation is evident in their textual rendition of certain experiential episodes they underwent in the Orient. While both Orientalists’ attraction to the Arab East may have been epistemological in origin, I argue that their narratives on Arab homoeroticism have been discursively subjective. In this, they appear to reflect the selectivity with which fin-­‐de-­‐siècle Arab scholars had been reproducing accounts of their past cultural heritage; albeit paradoxically. When Burton and Lawrence seem to have been heightening manifestations of Arab male-­to-male sexuality, their contemporary Arab intellectuals had been engaged in a process of systematic attenuation of the traces of past depictions of homoerotic desire in Arabic literature.\ud \ud Although I focus on analysing texts from both Orientalists, I also draw on contemporary historical events, for they form part of the contextual framework in which my analysis operates.