Research Interests

My latest book is the co-authored (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 (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 leading an externally funded project, with colleagues at Lancaster and An-Najah National University of Palestine, called 'Countermapping Urban Palestine'. 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 and producing a pilot map, indexed with literary and testimonial data, of the West Bank city of Nablus. Our website (under construction) is here: https://countermapup.wordpress.com/

My 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.

With Dr Delphine Grass (School of Global Affairs), I co-lead the Transcultural Writing, Practice and Research Network that brings together Lancaster University and other academics and practitioners to promote and research transcultural and translinguistic practice: see https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/transculturalwriting/

Current Teaching

I currently teach on ENGL101 World Literature and on a new Postcolonial LIterature module.

I taught extensively across undergraduate and postgraduate taught courses in the erstwhile Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, designing and delivering modules on world writing, postcolonial women's writing, contemporary Middle Eastern literature, contemporary literature, postcolonial Indian fiction, and African iterature. I also contribute to the MA in transnational cinema.

My Role

I am currently the Unit of Assessment Lead for English Literature and Creative Writing.

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in receiving high quality proposals from PhD applicants in Palestinian literature; Modern Arab and wider Middle Eastern literature and cinema, particularly in the global Anglosphere; postcolonialism and the Arab world; Anglophone Arab literature; migration/diaspora literature