BA (University of Toronto), MSc (University of Glasgow), PhD (York University)
Hamza Karam Ally is an Assistant Professor in the Contemporary Studies and the Foundation Year Programs. He has a PhD in Humanities from York University. His doctoral work developed the subject of radical alterity/otherness in texts from multiple literary traditions, working with phenomenology and postcolonial theory.
His current project seeks to explore the problem of God’s alternating immanence and transcendence in the Abrahamic tradition through a phenomenological approach. He has recently published work on alterity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the colonized ‘other’ in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, apophatic spirituality in the work of Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster, and on trauma and mourning in Don DeLillo’s post 9/11 novel Falling Man.
His teaching and supervision interests include Modernism, nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, postcolonialism, and Continental philosophy. He has an unwritten novel in mind which he is pretty sure could be either brilliant or else terrible.
Publications
- “‘Which Story Do You Prefer?’: The Limits of the Symbolic in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi”. Literature and Theology, Oxford University Press, vol. 34, no. 1, Mar 2020, pp. 83–100.
- “Things that Happen in the Dark: Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and Emmanuel Levinas on the Self and the Other”. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol 46, no. 4, Dec 2019, pp. 561-73.
- “Mourning in the Age of Terror: Revisiting Don DeLillo’s Elusive 9/11 novel Falling Man”. Canadian Review of American Studies, University of Toronto Press, vol. 49, no. 3, Nov 2019, pp. 349-371.
- “The Stranger and the Other: Radical Alterity in Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation”. Otherness: Essays and Studies, Aarhus University, vol. 6, no. 2, Dec 2018, pp. 258-280.
Conference Papers
- “Speaking Nearby: Toward a Phenomenological Language of Alterity”. Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Conference paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, June 2019.
Current Project
- Most High and Most Near—The Immanence of God and Transcendental Givenness
