Enseignement
TEACHING
التعليم
My teaching pedagogy, like my scholarship, aims to highlight the nuances of Arab/ic and Muslim cultural production across geopolitical spheres, languages, and mediums. I seek to foster collaborative and critical learning environments for students to engage with and produce work that is both theoretically sophisticated and methodologically interdisciplinary. My courses look beyond traditional literary genres to the mediums of film, visual arts, music, and digital media, which have developed into prominent vehicles of cultural expression and social change.
Cours à venir
UPCOMING COURSES
الدورات القادمة
Fall 2022: Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory
This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres—such as Afrofuturism—we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.
Fall 2022: Contemporary Critical Theory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics
This graduate seminar introduces key debates in contemporary theory from a broad cross-section of disciplinary perspectives, fields, and cultural contexts. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, we will explore critical models of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. These theories shape not only how we come to understand the nature of cultural objects (literature, film, art), but also the principles, methodologies, and ethical stakes of their analysis. Our seminar topics include: global Marxism; orientalism and anti-colonial discourse; (post)secularism; feminist and queer theory; embodiment and affect; as well as critical race theory. Engaging recent critical projects to “theorize from below,” we will put foundational texts of the Euro-American canon into conversation with translated works of theory from the global south. In so doing, our seminar asks: What comes to count as theory and how do we account for alternative practices of knowledge production? Where does theory come from and what are the political economies that structure its circulation? Finally, what is the relationship of theory to embodiment, affect, and experience?
Cours passés
PAST COURSES
الدورات السابقة
Direction de recherches
ADVISING
الإرشاد الأكاديمي
I advise Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. students across Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Middle East and North African Studies, Islamic Studies, African Studies, as well as French and Francophone Studies.
Dissertation Highlights
“Mad Love: Islamic Thought and the Poetics of Desire in the Legend of Layla and Majnun”
“Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narrating Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction”
“Forms of Resilience: African Fiction and the Crisis of Capitalism”
“Al-Tajrīb (Experimentalism) in the Moroccan New Novel and the Debate over Legitimacy”
“Wonders and Curiosities: Itinerant Writing Across Ottoman Worlds”
Thesis Highlights
“Bound Clouds and Mutated Auras: Alia Ali’s FLOW Series”
“It Takes Blood to Make a Family: Monstrous Pregnancy and Queer Kinship in The Twilight Saga”
“What Does the Fox Say? Citationality, Communication, and Translation in Muḥammad Zafzāf’s al-Thaʿlab Alladhī Yaẓharu wa-Yakhtafī”
“Without a Sky: Convergence of the Past, Present, and Future in Yemeni novella A Land Without Jasmine”
“The Life of Omar ibn Said and the Rhetoric of Arabic Slave Narratives”
“Sufi Poetics of Perplexity; Expressions of Taqallub, Gender and Unknowing in Raja Alam’s Hubba”
“The Poetics of Arab Andalusian Poetry in Federico García Lorca’s Diván Del Tamarit”