Dr Ahmed Honeini

Contact me at ahmed.honeini.2015@live.rhul.ac.uk

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.

My primary research interests are: 

• Twentieth-century American literature, culture, and film

• Modernist literature and culture

• William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

• Representations of death throughout literary history, from the ancient to the contemporary

• The home and family on the American stage, from Eugene O'Neill to Suzan-Lori Parks

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

• The history of the novel, from Defoe to the present

• Shakespeare's influence upon Faulkner and the literature of the wider United States

• American Romanticism: Washington Irving; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herman Melville; Walt Whitman; and Emily Dickinson

• Edgar Allan Poe; Joseph Conrad; James Joyce; T. S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway; Vladimir Nabokov; William S. Burroughs; and Cormac McCarthy

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 book on homes, homelessness, and exile in the plays of Tennessee Williams.

I am also writing a series of journal articles 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, will be published in a special issue of The Faulkner Journal on postmodernism and transgressive fiction, which I am currently guest editing and which is due for publication in early 2022. 

I am the founding director of Faulkner Studies in the UK, a research network devoted to Faulkner established in 2017. The Network's endeavours have been made possible with the generous support of the Department of English at Royal Holloway. The Network has also benefited from the support of the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) and the US Embassy, London. Our efforts have been officially recognised by both the Estate of William Faulkner and the William Faulkner Society. Follow us on Twitter, @Faulkner_UK.

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); and the William Faulkner Society (2021). 

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; The Joseph Conrad Society (UK); 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.