Office: WMB 5.136

Phone: 512-471-3880

saali@mail.utexas.edu

Research interests:
Islamic kingship, court literature and patronage, classical historiography, modern and medieval folklore and folklife, Arab women poets, oral performance of Homeric epic, literary criticism


Courses taught:


Recent Publications:
"Singing Samarra (861-956): Poetry and the Burgeoning of Historical Narrative upon the Murder of al-Mutawakkil." Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. V. 5. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

"Reinterpreting al- Buhturi's Iwan Kisra Ode: Tears of Affection for the Tragic Cycles of History." Journal of Arabic Literature. Vol. 37, no. 1. (2006). Leiden: E. J. Brill.

"Al-Buhturi". In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Arabic Literary Culture, 500-925. Vol. 311. Ed. Michael Cooperson and Shawkat M. Toorawa. Charleston: Bruccoli and Layman, 2005.

"Praise for Murder?: Two Odes by al-Buhturi surrounding an Abbasid Patricide." In Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relation from Abbasid to Safavid Times (Vol. 16 in Series, Literaturen im Kontext: Arabisch - Persisch - Turkisch). Ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Louise Marlow. Wiesbaden, Germany: Verlag, 2004. 1 -38.

Co-editor with Esther Raizen, Ph.D. Special Issue of The CALICO Journal: The World Wide Web in Non-Roman Script: CALI in Arabic and Hebrew. San Marcos, TX: Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, 2004.