Wen-chin Ouyang

Wen-chin Ouyang was born in Taiwan and raised in Libya. She completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York City.

She taught Arabic language, literature and culture at Columbia University, University of Chicago and University of Virginia before she moved to London. She is interested in critical theory and thought as well as poetics and prosaics. She has written extensively on classical and modern Arabic narrative and literary criticism.

She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling. She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. She chairs the publications committee of Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature. She was Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures (2011-2020) and a member of the editorial board of Bulletin of SOAS (2003-2013). She chaired the editorial board of Middle East in London Magazine (2007-08) and contributes regularly to Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature.

A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies. She is Fellow of the British Academy (see profile and information on comparative literature) and Academician of Academia Sinica.