Souad Etmimi is a PhD researcher in Arab and Islamic Studies, at Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sousse, Tunisia, Specialized in Contemporary Cultural Studies.  She is preparing a PhD thesis entitled "The Intellectual as a Subject of Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought". She obtained a master's degree in Arabic language, literature and civilization in the field of modern civilization at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sousse (Tunisia).
She obtained two student exchange scholarships at two universities. The first one is in Marburg in Germany, at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) in 2018 and at the second one in 2019 at University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy.
In 2019, she published a book with the Arab House of Egypt entitled "The Pictures of the Imam in the Modern Islamic Discourse, Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal as a model". She has an article published in the same year as part of the proceedings of a symposium that took place at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Kairouan (Tunisia), entitled “The Dialectic of the Estrangement and Communication between the Right Sciences and the Human Sciences".

Research Project

Intellectual as subject of Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought

My project aims at deconstructing the image of the intellectual in the intellectuals’ discourse as a subject of their criticism. It is based on the analysis of six texts – written between 1989 and 2013 – that reveal the opinion of the thinkers in the chosen corpus. By studying the historical, political, cultural and social context of criticism the aim of my research is to look closely at the elements that constitute it in order to define its various ‘trends’ such as liberal, socialist and Islamic ones. The six texts that the research is concerned with are the following: Towards a Theory of Culture, a Critique of Eurocentrism and Reverse Eurocentrism, by Samir Amin; Representations of the intellectual, by Edward Said; Illusions of the Elite or Criticism of the Intellectual, by Ali Harb; The Rupture between the Intellectual and the Jurist: Aspects of the Estrangement between the Two Mental Structures: the Religious Intellectual and the Jurist, by Muhammad Yahya; The Cultural Bet and the Illusion of Estrangement, the Experience of Distance in the Approach of Time and Change, by Abdullah Hammoudi; and The End of the Preacher, the Possible and the Impossible in the Roles of Intellectuals, by Abdelilah Belkeziz.