​A UoS faculty member establishes himself firmly in scholarship of great renown by publishing two books, one each with Routledge and Cambridge University Press. The rigor that these publishers exercise would make this accomplishment the envy of serious scholars around the world. Dr. Andrew J. Power of the Department of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Arts has successfully produced two such publications this year.

This month Routledge Press published Andrew J. Power's second major work of literary criticism of the year, The Birth and Death of the Author (July 6th 2020). An Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Sharjah, Power's latest book is "a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept" that charts the theoretical history of the physical form of the book 'tablet to tablet': from clay tablets in ancient Sumeria (or modern day Iraq) to the digital interactive works that may be read on paper, on computers, and on digital 'tablets' alike. In a discipline, Literary Criticism, that still prioritises the traditional form of the book for the dissemination of serious scholarly academic work it also looks at the forever-shifting but ever-enduring cultural and intellectual enterprise that is authorship. Founded in 1836, Routledge (now a subsidiary of Taylor and Francis) have been publishing books of important literary and philosophical theory for centuries (authors like Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said all published original books with Routledge) and is today "the world's leading academic publisher in Humanities and Social Science".[1] Power's book makes a significant new contribution to our understanding of what it means to be an author in a moment of remarkable change in the technology of writing and reading.