Critic and Novelist

Rafik Darragi is currently a critic and novelist based in France. Born in Tunisia, he holds a PhD in English from the Sorbonne-Paris IV. A former Professor at the University of Tunis, and Director of the Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages. He was granted, in 1996, the Tunisian National Education Reward. Rafik Darragi is the author of several books and articles. Among his academic books La violence dans la tragédie jacobéenne (1988), The Sword and the Mask (1995), Theatrical Violence (2001), La Société de violence dans le théâtre élisabéthain (2012) and Hédi Bouraoui: la Parole autre (2015). His novels include Le Faucon d’Espagne (Paris: L’Harmattan 2003), Egilona, la Dernière reine des Wisigoths (Paris: L’Harmattan 2002), Sophonisbe, la gloire de Carthage (Paris: Séguier 2005) La Confession  de Shakespeare (Paris: L’Harmattan 2007). Over the past decade, Rafik Darragi attended several international symposiums. Among the papers he presented in English ‘Ideological Appropriation and Sexual Politics: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Ahmed Shawky’s Masra’ Cleopatra’, in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares, Proceedings of the VIII World Shakespeare Congress, Brisbane (Australia, 2006) published by the University of Delaware Press, Newark, 2008), and  ‘Shakespeare and the political Awakening  in the Arab World: An Analysis of Some Arab Adaptations  of the English Bard’ in Shakespeare and Tyranny: Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond (Murcia, Spain, 2012) published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

    A member of the ISA Executive Committee, Rafik Darragi contributed the “Arab world” entry to the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (OUP, 2001). He chaired the Arab Shakespeare panel at the VIII World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane. With Margaret Litvin, he is the Co-Author of the “Arab Shakespeares” entry in the forthcoming Shakespeare Encyclopedia (Stanford University Press).