International Association of Intercultural Studies (IAIS) or Association Internationale d'Etudes Interculturelle

For over twenty years Magdi Youssef was Professor of Comparative Literature and Drama Studies at Cairo University. The first to introduce modern Arabic literature and culture studies courses at a German university, he has taught in comparative socio-literary disciplines at the universities of Cologne, Bochum and Bonn for seventeen years. He is president of the International Association of Intercultural Studies (IAIS).

Youssef’s critical works have so far been published in six European languages and in Arabic. Among his most widely read and cited studies are The Myth of ‘European Literature’, Rotterdam, 1998; Socio-Cultural Interference and Intellectual Independence, Cairo, 1993; From Socio-Cultural Interference To Cross-Cultural Interaction, Cairo, 2001; Critical Debates, Cairo, 2007. His book Brecht in Aegypten, Versuch einer literatursoziologischen Deutung (Brecht’s Theatre in Egypt. A Socio-Literary Interpretation), Bochum, 1976, was reviewed in European, Canadian and US periodicals until 1990.

Magdi Youssef is a scholarly consultant to UNESCO. In 2009 he organized the IAIS congress entitled The Contemporary Arabic Contribution To World Culture – A Western-Arab Dialogue at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.