Dr. Mohammed Al-Baqai, a researcher, scholar and translator, was recently granted Saudi citizenship. The move came after the government decided to bestow the honor on a number of foreign nationals with specialist skills.
Al-Baqai currently works at the King Salman Center for Historical Studies of the Arabian Peninsula, where he is furthering a long legacy of investigating publications related to the history of the Arabian Peninsula and Saudi Arabia. In 2018, he was awarded the King Abdullah International Prize for Translation.
Al-Baqai was a teaching assistant at Homs University in Syria from 1982 to 1983, and a lecturer at Marseille Academy in France between 1998 and 2000. He was a part-time lecturer in pedagogy and research methodology at the French Stendhal University, in Grenoble for one year from 1990, a lecturer in literary criticism and linguistics at Homs University between 1992 and 1995, a lecturer in verbal and artistic translation and problems of translation at Jinan University, in Tripoli, Lebanon, and has been a professor of literary studies and criticism at King Saud University in Riyadh since 1996.
From 1995 to 1996, he was the vice dean for academic affairs at Homs University’s faculty of arts.
He was also a publication consultant for the Al-Faisal Journal of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, in Riyadh, and is chairman of the literature and criticism committee, and a member of the higher studies committee in the department of Arabic language, at King Saud University. He was an academic committee rapporteur in King Saud University’s Arabic language department and supervised a number of master’s degree and Ph.D. theses.
Al-Baqai gained a bachelor’s degree in Arabic language from Damascus University (1976-1980), a higher studies diploma in linguistics from the same institution in 1981, and an in-depth studies diploma (master’s degree), and Ph.D. in linguistics with honors, both from the University of Lyon II (1983-1992).
