LSA Collegiate Fellow
About
Dr. Randall is currently an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and will be an Assistant Professor of both Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies in 2022. Dr. Randall’s current project, Mad Archives of the Lebanese Civil War, identifies “madness” as a prevailing idiom used by Lebanese writers (working in Arabic and French) and visual artists to describe the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and its aftereffects. Drawing out theories of madness from political speeches, fiction, documentary film, and photography-based art, from independence to the present day, Dr. Randall demonstrates how an idiom which straddles multiple decades, media, and sects serves as an index of Lebanon’s status as a “postcolony.” Suturing the history of the war with pre- and post-war socioeconomic and political realities, Randall details how writers and artists imagine the country as a site of temporal and spatial proliferation, repetition and recreation: a condition which provokes ongoing ontological and existential crises — madness — at the level of both the body politic and the psychic body.
Current projects:
In addition to Mad Archives, Dr. Randall continues to research and publish on militarization in the Global South, and is conducting research for her second project on the global relevance of the concept of "moral injury."
Teaching interests:
World literature, the literary prize economy, postcolonial literature and theory, documentary film, global concepts of trauma and the psyche
