Amr Kamal

Amr Kamal is Associate Professor of French, Arabic, and Comparative Literature, at the City College of New York and at the Graduate Center. He is the coordinator for the minor of Middle East and North Africa Studies at City College. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth French and Francophone Literature; Francophone literature from the Mashreq (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria); Arabic Literature; Gulf studies, postcolonial literature; cultural geography; material culture, visual culture and media, translation studies, Mediterranean studies, and cinema. He held fellowships at the BOZAR Center for Fine Arts in Brussels, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He was a resident scholar at the Boghossian Foundation, Center for Art and Dialogue in Brussels. He is the author of Emporialism: Department Store Fiction and the Politics of the Mediterranean (SUNY Press 2024). The book was awarded Honorable Mention for the ACLA René Wellek prize, 2025. The award recognizes each year’s best book overall in Comparative Literature. He is currently working on his next monograph: Iconography of Displacement: Deconstructing Imagery of Uprootedness in Contemporary Mediterranean Cinema.