I am an associate professor in Postcolonial, Comparative and American Studies at An-Najah National University in Palestine. I am highly interested in teaching and conducting research on literature and art as well as examining the various modes and paradigms of literary, historical, socio-political and cultural displacements in the twenty-first century.
My first book, Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing (Palgrave, 2018), offers a nuanced study of comparative representations of displacement in modern American and Palestinian literature; it is also an urgent reminder of the disjunctive politics of mobility in the post/colonial landscape. This book argues persuasively for a distinction between exile and expatriation, and it realizes a form of Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ criticism, which allows for the disjunctions - and traumas - that emerge from a truly comparative study. The distinctions this book makes lead to new insights into modern American works, in which romanticized notions of exile abound. This work offers a model of literary criticism that listens attentively, including to Palestinian voices that have too often gone unheard.
I have also co-edited Post-Millennial Palestinian: Literature, Memory, Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2021). This book explores ways in which Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. The collection of essays offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period.
I am a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of World Journal of English Language and An-Najah National University Journals.
Work with Students
I advise M.A. and B.A students across English, comparative literature, Palestinian and Arabic literature, postcolonial literature and American studies and translation studies.
MA Dissertation Highlights: “The Representation of Home, Gender and Borders in Contemporary Palestinian Cinema: Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding and Bacha’s Naila and the Uprising”; “Reframing Politics: The Role of Translation in Shaping Arab Political Thought in the
Colonialism Era”; “The Turn in The Concept of Return in Boaz Gaon’s ‘Ha-Hshiva Le-Haifa’; Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Kassem Hawal’s Film ‘Return to Haifa’ as an Adaptation of Kanafani’s ‘Return to Haifa’”; “The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”
Selected Examined MA Dissertations: Husam Abusalem, “Heritagization, Politics and Social Justice – Palestinian Refugee Heritage”, University of Malta; Abeer Banifadel, “Writing Back Against Erasure in Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks and Harb’s Remians” , Arab American University; Tharwat Arafat, “A Sociolinguistic Study of Word Elongation: Palestinian Arabic in Translation”, An-Najah National University; Fatima Sameeh Hamed Abu Ghannam, “The Strategy of Omission & its Significance in the Translation of Barghouti's “I Saw Ramallah”
Muna Ahmad Reda Qasim, “Translating Tourist Advertising Brochures from Arabic into English: Strategies and Linguistic Inaccuracy”; Shima’ Hanini Al-Hanini, “Traces of Ideology in Qur’an Translations: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Some Themes”; Rafa Maqboul, The Spectrality of Translation: Jabra’s and Mutran’s Translations of Eschatological and Supernatural Terms in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Selected Publications
- Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- Post-millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021)
- “To Reverse or to Rehearse: Performing Colonial Reality in Arna’s Children”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2020. DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1845770
- “Trust neither the Horse, nor Modernity”: Explicating Mahmoud Darwish’s Allusions to Babylon, Sodom and Ancient Indians in “Counterpoint: Edward Said”, Comparative Literature: East & West, 2020, 4 (2) DOI: 10.1080/25723618.2020.1844114.
- “De-colonizing History and De-politicizing Territory in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape” - Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21:7 (2019), 1030-1044. DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2019.1585913.
- "‘Can the subaltern speak?’: COVID-19 and decolonial pedagogy in Palestinian universities", Journal for Cultural Research, DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1936106, 2021.
- "Corporeal Crisis and the Contested Female Terrain: An Ecofeminist Reading of ‘The Birth-Mark’
- "Travel and Imperialist Nostalgia in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa", International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES) Vol. 22, No.1, 2022. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.22.1.9
- "Code-Switching and Diasporic Identity in Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir and Fawaz Turki’s Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American", Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2022.2091516.
- "Shakespearean intertextuality in Mahmoud Darwish: The Otherness of the Proper Name in Darwish and Rita and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet", English Studies.
- “A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man”, Arab Studies Quarterly
Teaching
Modern and contemporary American literature; postcolonial studies; comparative literature; Palestinian literature and culture; world literature; Arab-American literature, orientalism and oriental studies; exile and émigré literature.