Ahmed Honeini

I was educated at King’s College London (BA English with Film Studies, 2013), University College London (MA English: Issues in Modern Culture, 2014), and Royal Holloway (PhD English, 2018). My doctoral thesis was on death in the work of William Faulkner.

I have been appointed Honorary Research Associate in American Literature from September 2021 to September 2024. 

Contact me at ahmed.honeini@rhul.ac.uk and/or ahmed.honeini@baas.ac.uk

My primary research interests are: 

• American literature, drama, and cinema (1900-present), with an emphasis on William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, and Southern literature; 
• Modernism, postmodernism, and transgressive fiction; 
• Thanatology and Death Studies;
• Gender and sexuality studies.

I also have strong secondary research interests in the following areas: 

• The history of the novel, from Defoe to the present;
• William Shakespeare; Edgar Allan Poe; Herman Melville; Joseph Conrad; James Joyce; T. S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Federico García Lorca; Ernest Hemingway; Flannery O'Connor; William S. Burroughs; Arthur Miller; Sidney Lumet; Stanley Kubrick; Cormac McCarthy; David Cronenberg; Tracy Letts; and Sarah Kane.

My first monograph, William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound, was published by Routledge in July 2021. I am currently working on a new major project: a monograph entitled Tennessee Williams's America: Homes, Families, Exiles, under contract with Routledge (April 2025).

I am also writing a quartet of essays exploring comparisons and confluences between Faulkner and a number of American and European writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Vladimir Nabokov. The first of these, on Faulkner, Hemingway, and World War One, has been published in The Mississippi Quarterly (72.4, 2020). The second of these, on Faulkner, Nabokov, and Lolita, was published in a special issue of The Faulkner Journal on postmodernist literature and transgressive fiction and which I guest edited. The third, on Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and "Annabel Lee," will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays focussing on Faulkner Studies in France, edited by Frédérique Spill and Solveig Dunkel.

Alongside these publications, an account of the current state of European Faulkner Studies was published in a special issue of The Southern Quarterly focussing on Southern Studies in Europe (59.3, December 2022). 

I am the founder of Faulkner Studies in the UK, a research network devoted to Faulkner established in 2017. Follow us on Twitter, @Faulkner_UK.

I was appointed Associate Editor of The Faulkner Journal in September 2021. 

From January 2023, I will be an Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies for four years. 

Finally, I am Mentor to the Student Ambassadors of the Florida Hemingway Society.

I have been teaching in the Department of English since 2017, leading seminars on modules including the history of the novel, literary theory and criticism, and American literature. 

I was invited to create teaching materials and a short video lecture on Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) for the Department's TeacherHub>English initiative for KS4 and KS5 English Literature teachers. 

I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). 

From 2018 to 2020, I was the Department of English's Non-Established Teachers' Representative. 

Conference presentations

Since 2016, I have disseminated my research at numerous conferences, including events held by the Center for Faulkner Studies (2016); the British Association for American Studies (2017); the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society (2017); the Joseph Conrad Society (2017, 2020); the Hemingway Society (2018); the British Association of Modernist Studies (2019); the Modern Language Association (2021); the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies (2021); the William Faulkner Society (2021); the Southern Studies Forum of the European Association for American Studies (2022); and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (2022).

Event organisation 

I have also been involved with the organisation of several scholarly events, including numerous Royal Holloway English Department Research conferences, colloquia, and seminars, and the annual Faulkner_UK conference.

The William Faulkner Society; the Modern Language Association (MLA); the British Association for American Studies (BAAS); the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS); the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA); the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; the Hemingway Society; and the Florida Hemingway Society.

Funding awards

I have been awarded various research grants, including from: the English Department at Royal Holloway; the Modern Language Association (MLA); the British Association for American Studies (BAAS); the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS); the John W. Hunt Scholarship for Faulkner Studies from the William Faulkner Society; the Jim and Nancy Hinkle Grant from the Hemingway Society; and the John Kuehl Fellowship from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.