Research Interests

I am co-authoring (with Nadia Atia) Global Literature and the Middle East: Twenty-First Century Arab Perspectives in English, commissioned for Routledge’s Twenty-first Century Global Literature series (forthcoming 2024). The book contextualises the rise of post-millennial Arab literatures in the Anglosphere. It explores the politics of translation, circulation, and reception, in chapters on the international literary prize economy, violence, global labour and forced migration, sexuality, and speculative fiction.

I am particularly committed to Palestinian literature and am leading a project, with colleagues at Lancaster and An-Najah National University of Palestine, called 'Storying Urban Palestine: Literary/Digital Maps'. Creative literature makes vital but under-explored contributions to Palestinian heritage preservation. We are data-mining, analysing, and cartographically locating place/space references in literature set in three cities: Nablus and Ramallah in Eastern Palestine (the West Bank) and the coastal city of Haifa (in what is now Israel).

My second monograph, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (Routledge, 2018) returns postcolonial studies to some of its formative contexts and enjoins it to account more fully for the Arab world. It explores (post)colonial continuities, literary productions of hospitable nations, and histories that produced c21 Arab uprisings.

Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World, co-edited with Abir Hamdar (Routledge, 2015) was the first collection to explore creative responses to political Islam, bringing together international scholars from Middle Eastern and postcolonial literary, film, and cultural studies. The book was informed by the AHRC/ESRC-funded research project Islamism in Arab Fiction and Film (2009-10).

My Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (Routledge, 2008) was one of the first books to bring together Anglophone, Francophone and Arabophone women writers, filmmakers, and other visual artists, emphasizing a continually contested politics of representation.

I was former co-director of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research (http://www.transculturalwriting.com,) which we are rebooting as a research cluster with colleagues from across FASS.

Current Teaching

ENGL455 World Writing: From the Body to the Globe; ENGL320 Contemporary Middle Eastern Literature; ENGL308 Contemporary Literature.

From 2023/24 I will convene ENGL101 World Literature.

Other teaching experience at Lancaster: ENGL421 Postcolonial Women's Writing; ENGL201 Theory and Practice of Criticism; ENGL302 Women's Writing; ENGL352 African Literature; ENGL369 Twentieth-Century Indian Novel in English/Postcolonial Indian Novel; ENGL304 American Literature from 1900; lectures on ENGL100 English Literature and ENGL101 World Literature.

Additional Information

I am currently the Department's Research Director.

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in receiving high quality proposals from PhD applicants in: -Modern Arab and wider Middle Eastern literature in the global Anglosphere -Palestinian, Lebanese and 'Levantine' literatures -Postcolonial theory and the Arab world -Migration/diaspora literature