Areeg Ibrahim

Their Fulbright story

Dr. Areeg Ibrahim is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Helwan University in Cairo. Her path to one of the world's most storied campuses began, fittingly for a scholar of literature, with a printed advertisement: a notice in Al-Ahram newspaper that led her to the Fulbright website, where she found a teaching-and-research grant at Yale University. "Going there became a dream for me," she recalls.

She wrote a detailed proposal describing the teaching she hoped to undertake and the research she planned to pursue — daydreaming, as she puts it, until a call to interview at the Fulbright office began to turn the dream into something real. The congratulatory email that followed arrived "beyond my expectations," and with it came the weight of a new responsibility: to teach, and to represent, at Yale.

At Yale she served as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Council on Middle East Studies (CMES), where she taught an advanced course in Arabic literature, language, and culture. Her students read literary texts in Arabic, listened to the music of Fairuz, and watched scenes from the screen adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy — an immersive attempt to integrate language, art, and cultural context in a single course.

The experience deepened her commitment to comparative literature as a bridge between traditions. She brought that cross-cultural pedagogy home to Helwan University, where she continues to teach, research, and translate across English and Arabic letters.

An ad in the newspaper led me to a website, and a website led me to Yale. Fulbright turned a daydream into a classroom where Arabic literature, music, and film could speak to American students — and that exchange changed how I teach to this day.