Dr. Samia Touati is the author of Literacy: Access to Information and Development in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century Moroccan Society (University Press of America, 2010). Her past research projects include sociolinguistic studies of linguistic diversity and the idea of the nation, and the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and semiotic study of the speech of Casablanca fishermen. She is an adjunct instructor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.