Dr Rashwan is a scholar of Arabic and Comparative Poetics. He is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the United Arab Emirates University. He holds a PhD in Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, University of London. He is the recipient of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) Research Fellowship. 

In recognition of his dedication to research, teaching, and community service, he was appointed Honorary Research Fellow (2022–2025) at the University of Birmingham, UK, and elected for a five-year term as a Fellow of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), based in Berlin. From 2018 to 2022, he was a Research Fellow in Arabic Literary Theory on a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) at the University of Birmingham. Prior to joining the GlobalLIT project, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the American University of Beirut.

Dr. Rashwan co-edited "Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Poetics: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Literary Theory" (Oxford University Press) and edited "Beyond Arabic: Multilingual Poetics in Premodern Islamic Worlds" (a special issue in postmedieval published by Springer Nature). He is the author of "Rediscovering Ancient Egyptian Literature through Arabic Poetics" (forthcoming from the American University in Cairo Press). His articles have appeared in postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies; PMLA; Studia Islamica; Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric; Translation and Interpreting Studies; Interdisciplinary Literary Studies; and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. His primary research goal is to reinvigorate the study of non-European literary theory and criticism and to let the studied cultures speak for themselves without any automatic imposition of Eurocentrism or Arabocentrism.