Tom Hefter
Tom Hefter has been teaching Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at UH
since 2023. Born in Wisconsin, he began learning Arabic while working as an ESL teacher
in Cairo Egypt. Returning to the US, he decided to pursue doctoral studies and received
a PhD with honors in Classical Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies from the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2008. Since then, he has taught both
Classical and Modern Arabic Literature and Culture courses and all levels of Arabic
Language at a number of institutions, including American University in Cairo, the
College of Willian and Mary, the University of Oklahoma and Princeton. His scholarly
research has focused mainly on the writings of the ninth-century theologian, linguist,
humorist and polymath al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869 CE). His monograph, The Reader in al-Jāḥiẓ, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014. Lately he has been concentrating
on translating some of al-Jāḥiẓ’s works to English.