Christina Phillips

Tina Phillips is the newly appointed His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Professor of Modern Arabic Studies based in the Faculty of Asian and Middle East Studies. Tina did her UG at the University of Oxford and obtained a PhD from SOAS in 2006 with a research thesis in intertextuality and experimentalism in modern Arabic literature. She comes to Cambridge from the University of Exeter, where served in different academic roles, including most recently Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (2022-25).

Tina’s research interests lie in modern Arabic literature, culture and translation with a particular specialism in Egypt and Palestine. Her 2019 monograph Religion in the Egyptian Novel explored the co-imbrication of religious and secular discourse in contemporary Arab culture and included the first academic study of Coptic fiction. She is currently writing a book on Literature and Environment in Palestine 1960–2023 which uses Palestinian novels, short stories and memoirs to understand how slow-moving environmental catastrophe and spatial injustice are articulated amid fast-moving crises and territorial conflict. Tina is an established translator of Arabic literature and has published novels and short stories by notable authors, including Nobel Prize for Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad Berrada, and Hanan al-Shaykh. She is chair of the 2025 Saif Ghobash Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.