Sherif Abdelkarim

Assistant Professor

Areas of Expertise

Ethics & aesthetics; Law & literature; Lexicography; Medievalism; Narrative theory; Performance studies; Translation studies

Education

B.A., William & Mary; Ph.D., University of Virginia
Sherif Abdelkarim

Biography

Sherif Abdelkarim specializes in English historical linguistics and Old English, Middle English, and classical Arabic literature. His primary book project, Hypocrisy: Private Laws, Literary Publics, 500-1500, examines conceptions and representations of hypocrisy across the premodern world.

Selected Publications


Books

Katherine Jacka, Ahmad Kzzo, Matt King, and Sherif Abdelkarim, eds. and trans. Al-Idrisi’s Norman Kingdom in the South: The Book of Roger in Translation, Arc Humanities Press, 2024


Essays and Chapters

“Islam,” The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. William Stockton (Routledge, 2026), pp.170-178

“Poverty, Race and Ethnicity,” A Cultural History of Poverty in the Medieval Age, ed. Eliza Buhrer (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), pp.93-115

"The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle," ROEP: Resources for Old English Prose (2025)

“The Way of the Superbious Man: Alexander to Aristotle and the Riddle of the Letter,” English Studies 105.5 (2024): pp.750-71

“Chaucer Unlimited, or, Reading Chaucer Elsewhere,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 31.1 (2024): pp.65-84

“The Terms of Hypocrisy in Early English Law and Literature: Ælfric and Wulfstan,” Law, Literature, and Social Regulation in Early Medieval England, ed. Andrew Rabin and Anya Adair (Boydell Press, 2023), pp.236-258

“Ibn al-Khaṭīb: Character Assassin,” PMLA 137.1 (2022): pp.70-87

Covering Nubia,” The Sundial (2022)

“Afterword,” Strangers at the Gate!Multidisciplinary Explorations of Communities, Borders, and Othering in Medieval Western Europe, ed. SC Thomson (Brill, 2022), pp.225-231

“Chaucer’s Amoral Lyrics,” Mediaevistik 34 (2021): pp.143-52

“This Land is Your Land: Citizenship in England and Arabia, 500–1000,” Postmedieval 11.2 (2020): pp.396-406

Sīrah,” New Literary History 50.3 (2019): pp.327-333