About

Professor Wright describes himself as a humanist and student of the workings of the religious imagination who applies the tools of the historian and rhetorical critic to Muslim literatures. As an historian, he reads Islamic texts for clues to their historical contexts and implied audiences. As a rhetorical critic, he studies the ways in which the use of literary devices such as allusion, citation, and echo suggest intertextual relations among religious literatures and the communities that hold them sacred. His work builds upon the pioneering studies of Egyptian modernists such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the renegade American classicist-turned-Islamicist Norman O. Brown.