Samia Mehrez is Professor Emerita of Arabic Literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC), where she is also the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani (AUC Press, 1994); Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Routledge 2008); and The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui: A Journey with my Grandfahter (2021), which won the Sawiris Cultural Award. In 2025, she published her first novel in Arabic, Nadia’s Empire. In 2022, Mehrez held her first art exhibition at AUC’s Falaki Gallery, Cairo. She later published a book based on the exhibition, SamBoozies: An Aesthetics of Junk (Diwan, 2025).