Building Bridges Seminar

Salwa El-Awa is a lecturer in modern languages at Swansea University, specializing in Arabic and Islamic studies. Her research and teaching interests include Arabic linguistics and modern linguistic analysis of Arabic and Islamic text, particularly the Qur'an, as well as researching contemporary Islamic movements, their ideologies, and their changing relations with the state and law enforcement authorities. She previously was a lecturer in Qur'anic studies in the University of Birmingham's Department of Theology and Religion, where she co-led the two-year-long research program that produced "Police-Muslim Engagement and Partnerships for the Purposes of Counter-Terrorism: An Examination” (2009). She is also the author of The Qur'anic Text: Relevance, Coherence and Structure (2005). El-Awa moved from Egypt to the United Kingdom in 1998 to pursue her Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she studied contemporary linguistic theory and utilized it to explain a number of problematic questions about the structure of the Qur’anic text.