Assistant Professor, Middle East Studies
About
I am an Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan. My research examines Arab and Muslim societies and their cultural production through contemporary, interdisciplinary, and critical perspectives. I earned a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
My scholarship focuses on the cultural semiotics of corporeality, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Iraq, as well as the development of Iraqi feminist intellectual production and its transnational alliances. As a specialist in modern Arabic literature, I work primarily on Iraqi fiction and its intersections with Anglo-American literature. Drawing on feminist studies, cultural semiotics, psychoanalysis, and political theory, I investigate the ethics and aesthetics of corporeal representation in contemporary Arab culture.
My first monograph, Writing Through the Body: Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror (UB Press, 2024), offers a sociocultural and literary genealogy of the body in Iraqi culture, highlighting the influence of Anglo-American narratives surrounding the War on Terror. Engaging Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics, Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage,” and Hannah Arendt’s political theory, the book argues for the importance of ethical representation in contemporary Arab writing, particularly in depictions of violence. It examines works by Sinan Antoon, Hassan Blasim, Ahmed Saadawi, and Alia Mamdouh in both the original Arabic and English translation. I have also published four journal articles on contemporary Iraqi fiction.
