Huda Fakhreddine (Arabic) has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities in support of her 2013-2014 leave for a project titled: A Study of Classic Arabic Poetry through the Lens of Metapoesis (Modern Critical Theory). The goal of this book project is to expand the study of metapoesis from the study of modern poetry in the twentieth century to using a “comparative modernism” approach to studying Arabic literature of the 8th and 9th century. Not only does this approach emphasize the critical and poetic consciousness central to the poetry of that period, it also offers a new perspective on the relationship of the Abbasid modernists to their successors: the modernists of the twentieth century. This will be the only work in the field that treats both classical and modern Arabic poetry within a contemporary theoretical framework. It will also add a valuable non-western perspective to the field of World Literature.