Work experience

• Winner of the Higher York Award, 2012
• Staff member at Baghdad University 2004-2010 in the College of Islamic Studies (teaching religious translation module for PhD students and Arabic and English language for first year undergraduate students).
• Lecturer at Al-Furat University/ Syria, 2006-2008
• Winner of BBC Arabic very short story, April 2009

Education

• PhD in English - Modern Comparative Literature (Thesis title:'The Poetics of Human Rights: Auden and al-Jawahiri in the 1930s' at the University of York)
  
• MA in English Literature (Modern Poetic Drama-W. H. Auden) / Almustansiriyah University/ Baghdad-Iraq
• BA in English (Almustansiriyah University / Baghdad-Iraq)

Interests

Ahmed’s academic background is in Arabic Language and Literature. He is also a writer and a poet in Arabic and English. He is interested in translating the untranslatable, i.e. translating poetry into poetry. Since 2003, he has been a Human Rights practitioner and a member of many Anti-Corruption, Development and Human Rights NGOs such as the Arab-European Centre for Human Rights and International Law-Norway. Since 2010, he has been a member of the family of human rights advocates in the Centre for Applied Human Rights - University of York.

After the war on Iraq in 2003, Ahmed worked with many NGOs, such as the Association of Iraqi Academics (known as AUL). Here in the UK, Ahmed worked with CARA in 2010, and Refugee Council and York City of Sanctuary in 2016 to help the Syrian refugees settle down. He is still working with YCoS since 2017.
Ahmed is a member of the York University of Sanctuary Monitoring and Evaluation Group.

Latest publications

• Khaleel (2023) Interview (in Arabic)  with Hekmah Yemanya. 
• Khaleel (2021) World War II in the Poetry of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics No. 41, Literature, History, and Historiography pp 136-169 (in Arabic)
• Eriksson & Khaleel (2018) Iraq After ISIS: The Challenges of Post-War Recovery. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Iraq-After-ISIS-Challenges-Post-War/dp/3030009548/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Iraq+after+isis&qid=1553694837&s=books&sr=1-1
• Khaleel (2018) The strange tales behind how some English words found their way into the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-strange-tales-behind-how-some-english-words-found-their-way-into-the-iraqi-dialect-of-arabic-93753
• "For the Train and Hamad" poem by Muzaffar al-Nawab. Translated by Ahmed Khaleel. Eborakon, Vol 2, issue 1, 2017.