About

Eric Stickley Calderwood is a professor affiliated with the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. His research interests encompass North African Literature and Film, Modern Spanish Literature and Film, al-Andalus (Medieval Muslim Iberia), Modern Arabic Literature, Mediterranean Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Travel Writing. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has received numerous awards and honors, including the LAS Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar for 2024-25, the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2016-2017. Calderwood is the author of the book 'Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture,' which has received multiple accolades and has been translated into Spanish. His scholarly work includes articles and book chapters on topics such as Moroccan literature, al-Andalus, and the cultural histories of the Mediterranean region. Additionally, he has contributed to critical editions and literary essays, and has appeared in media interviews discussing related themes. His academic career is marked by a focus on the cultural and literary intersections of North Africa, Spain, and the broader Mediterranean, emphasizing historical and postcolonial perspectives.

Research topics

• Literature
• Political Science
• Art
• Geology
• History
• Philosophy
• Astrobiology
• Physics
• Astronomy
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics
• Law
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Rethinking translating cultures

  Babel Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation / Revista Internacional de Traducción · 2025-07-14

  article

  Abstract The concept of “translating cultures” embodies a dynamic interplay between translation and culture, suggesting both their complementarity and consubstantiality. This special issue emerges from the work of the UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures, established in 2023 with the support of the Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission in Saudi Arabia. It builds upon three decades of scholarship to critically re-examine foundational assumptions within this field, situating its exploration of translating cultures within the Arab cultural context while engaging with global discourses and research from both the Global North and Global South. This exploration is centered within the Arab cultural context, highlighting the historical significance of translating cultures in the Arab world and the emergence of Arabia, particularly the Gulf, as a key center for Arabophone translation. The four articles within this collection demonstrate how the translation of Arabic language and cultures is not only a linguistic act but also a vehicle for cultural adaptation, dialogue, and inclusion. By challenging Eurocentric paradigms and embracing geo-linguistic diversity, these essays mark an epistemological shift in translation studies, advocating for a critical reassessment of historical and methodological frameworks. Through interdisciplinary engagement, this issue calls for a more inclusive and reflexive approach to understanding translating cultures in a globalized world.

  PublisherDOI

• On Earth or in Poems

  2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Astrobiology
  • Geology
  • Literature
  PublisherDOI

• Spain’s African colonial legacies: Morocco and Equatorial Guinea compared

  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · 2023-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Strait Flow

  PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geology

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• What Is Moroccan Literature? History of an Object in Motion

  Journal of Arabic Literature · 2021 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • History

  Abstract What is Moroccan literature, where and when does it happen, and in what languages? In this essay, we tackle these questions by tracing the evolution of the definition of “Moroccan literature” from the first half of the twentieth century until the present. The earliest works of Moroccan literary historiography, such as ʿAbd Allah Kannūn’s al-Nubūgh al-maghribī fī al-adab al-ʿarabī (1937), situated Moroccan literature within the Arabic literary tradition and treated Moroccan literature as an important element in the “Arab-Islamic” identity promoted by the Moroccan nationalist movement. Since Moroccan independence in 1956, this definition of Moroccan literature has come under increasing pressure, as the languages and imaginative geographies of Moroccan literature have expanded to include new voices. In what follows, we consider these debates through a survey of a diverse corpus of literary-historical works that throw into question the linguistic, temporal, and spatial borders of Moroccan literature (and of Morocco itself).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spanish in a global key

  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · 2019-04-03 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay explores the possibilities and potential pitfalls of the Global Hispanophone by placing this emergent category in dialogue with recent developments in Hispanic studies and with ongoing debates in comparative literature about the status of the globe (or the world) as an analytic framework. Drawing on these debates, the essay examines the politics, hermeneutics and aesthetics of multilingual hip-hop, focusing on Khaled, a Spanish rapper of Moroccan descent, whose work weaves between languages (most notably, Spanish and Moroccan Arabic) and musical idioms. Khaled's multilingual performances challenge hegemonic positions of race, class, religion and place of origin. They also highlight transnational networks of solidarity between marginalized groups in Europe and the United States. Using Khaled's music as an illustrative example, this essay outlines a tentative vision of the Global Hispanophone, one that focuses on language practices rather than on geography. In what follows, the Global Hispanophone describes the tension between Spanish as a language of imperial power and Spanish as a language that spawns creative responses to power, often through nonstandard uses that throw into question the borders (geographic, cultural and even linguistic) of the language.

  PublisherDOI

• Moroccan Jews and the Spanish colonial imaginary, 1903–1951

  The Journal of North African Studies · 2018-04-09 · 21 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the relationship between Spanish colonialism and Moroccan Jews. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Spanish writers and politicians revived Spain’s Jewish heritage and used it to fortify cultural and political ties with Sephardic Jewish communities across the Mediterranean, and especially in Morocco. This revival of Spain’s Jewish identity has often been associated with the liberal ‘Philo-Sephardic’ movement of the early twentieth century, but, as I argue in this article, Philo-Sephardism survived until the end of the colonial period and implicated, along the way, Spaniards of all ideological stripes, from liberals to fascists. In both its liberal and fascist iterations, Philo-Sephardism was a platform for challenging France’s cultural influence among Moroccan Jews and for asserting Spain’s legitimacy as a colonial power. Philo-Sephardism was also strengthened and shaped by the extensive participation of Moroccan Jews, who contributed to the movement by collaborating with Spanish scholars and incorporating Philo-Sephardic discourses into their representations of Moroccan Jewish life. In what follows, I examine the contributions that Moroccan Jews made to Philo-Sephardism and especially to the academic and cultural institutions created under Francoism, such as the Maimonides Institute in Tetouan. I place particular emphasis on Isaac Benarroch Pinto’s novella ‘Indianos tetuaníes,’ published by the General Franco Institute for Hispano-Arab Research in 1951. This fascinating but virtually unknown literary text illustrates how some Moroccan Jews inserted themselves within Francoist culture and within Spanish imperial projects that wove together the histories of Spain, Morocco, and Latin America.

  PublisherDOI

• Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

  2018-04-09 · 26 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain's fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco's side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together was an effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain's colonization of Morocco and define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule. Many writers have celebrated convivencia, the fabled "coexistence" of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco's colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain's colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco's Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco. Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources...including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts...Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism....

  PublisherDOI

• Colonial al-Andalus

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-04-09 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Colonial al-Andalus

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-08-07 · 46 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Nancy Stolley

  1 shared

• Enrique García García

  1 shared

• Rachel Mumford

  Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

  1 shared

• Juli Highfi Ll

  1 shared

• Seth Kimmel

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Julia Chang

  1 shared

• Bram Acosta

  1 shared

• Jaime Rodríguez-Matos

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• LAS Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar, 2024-25
• Finalist for 2024 Sheikh Zayed Book Award
• Honorable Mention for 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize f…
• Conrad Humanities Scholar, 2018-2023
• 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies