About

Omar Sabbagh

Assistant Professor of English

Omar Sabbagh is an assistant professor of English literature and creative writing in the English and Creative Arts Department of LAU.  He has taught literature, creative writing, and philosophy courses at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and at the American University in Dubai (AUD) before joining LAU.

Research Interests

Dr. Sabbagh has research interests that range across modern English literature and creative writing.  The areas in which he conducts research are: the British novel (1850-1950), British literary modernism, narrative, auto/biography and life writing, contemporary poetry and fiction, psychoanalysis and modern literature, Christianity and modern literature, and the interface of philosophy and literature.

Selected Publications

Dr. Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf Magazine, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Philosophy Now, among many others.

Poetry:

  1. My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint (Cinnamon Press, 2010).
  2. Morning Lit: Portals After Alia (Cinnamon Press, 2022).
  3. For Echo (Cinnamon Press, 2024).
  4. Night Settles Upon The City (Daraja Press, 2024).

Fiction:

  1. Via Negativa: a parable of exile (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016).
  2. Minutes from the Miracle City (Fairlight Books, 2019).
  3. Y KNOTS: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023).

Selected Literary Criticism and Scholarly Papers:

  1. Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Anthem Press, 2020).
  2. ‘Aspects of Indefiniteness in George Eliot’s Middlemarch’ in The George Eliot Review (2005). https://georgeeliotreview.org/index.php/items/show/619.
  3. ‘Love’s Knowledge: Realisation Beyond Defence: Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet After, and Beyond, Ford’s The Good Soldier’ – published in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Sara Haslam, (Brill, 2015).
  4. ‘G.K. Chesterton’s London: Traversing Therapeutic Space’, published in December 2015, Vol. 41, Issue 3/4 of The Chesterton Review.
  5. ‘Humanism After Humanism: Henry Miller: Colossus Upon Colossus’, published in February 2016 in Nexus 11 (The Journal of the International Henry Miller Society).
  6. ‘The Authority of the Soul, and The Sole Authority: Comparing Two Catholic Memoirs: The Romantic Approach / The Classical’- on Hilaire Belloc and Ronald A. Knox, published in early 2017, in Vol 14 issue 1, (T&F) Life Writing. Published online in winter 2015. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9twVwuYv6vxmJdCvJyPZ/full
  7. ‘Facets of Exhaustion: The Mystic Antagonism of T.S. Eliot’s Music’, in Agenda, January 2018, Vol. 51, Issue 3-4: a special Double Issue, commemorating a T.S. Eliot Centenary.
  8. ‘F(r)ictions from the Critical Imaginary: The Singular Case of George Steiner’, (T&F) Prose Studies. Published 18th May, 2017, Vol. 39, Issue 1.http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WeaFtG627hmRGpXZD53z/full
  9. ‘Animating Places: Reading Fiona Sampson’s Limestone Country Beneath A Durrellian Lens’, published in (T&F) Prose Studies Vol. 6, Issue 1. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UJAFR6wtZyfqc5UdXYx6/full
  10. ‘History Free Indirect: Reading Creative Techniques in Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria.’ Published in EUP journal Victoriographies; issue 9.1, March 2019. Victoriographies: Vol 9, No 1 (euppublishing.com)
  11. ‘Nuance Nerd, Or, Finessing a Master of Finesse: Reading Stefan Collini.’  Forthcoming paper, 2026.
  12. ‘Bodies Of High Style: Insight and Form in Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov’ Forthcoming, December 2025, in Vol. 20 of Nabokov Studies https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257

Academic Degrees

  • PhD in English Literature, 2011, King’s College, University of London, UK.
  • MA in Philosophy, 2014, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
  • MA in Creative and Life Writing, 2007, Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK.
  • MA in English Literature, 2004, King’s College, University of London, UK.
  • BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, 2002, Oxford University.