Dr Rashwan is a scholar of Arabic and Comparative Poetics. He is an Assistant professor of Arabic Language and Literature at UAE University as well as an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Birmingham. 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 2015. His PhD research offers new criticism and analysis of ancient Egyptian literary devices based on Arabic-Semitic methodology, with full consideration of the unique visual nature of the Arabic and ancient Egyptian scripts.

He earned his PhD after defending a thesis on Arabic jinas, or what can loosely be termed ‘wordplay,’ ‘paronomasia’, or ‘pun,’ examined through a comparative lens with ancient Egyptian rhetorical traditions. Jinās is one of the most critical literary devices present throughout Quran, Hadith, Arabic poetry, literary prose, songs, and proverbs, because it covers an array of phonetic, semantic, and graphic associations between words that have similar forms but with different meanings. Using Arabic poetic traditions, he was able to rediscover ancient literary registers and tones, which had been entirely obliterated when studied in Western rhetorical traditions.