William and Sally Searle Research Scholar
About
Anouar Rahmani is an Algerian writer, journalist, translator, and human rights advocate. His work focuses on freedom of expression, women’s and children’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the rights of writers and marginalized communities.
His writing and advocacy have led to censorship and legal persecution in Algeria. He was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards in 2021. He received honorary support through the German Bundestag’s Parliamentarians Protect Parliamentarians program. He has also been supported by the Artist Protection Fund, Scholars at Risk, ICORN, and the PEN network.
Rahmani holds degrees in law from Algeria and a master’s degree in Global Communication and Applied Translation from Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught Arabic at Carnegie Mellon University and served as visiting faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.
As a novelist and public intellectual, he writes about freedom, exile, identity, migration, human dignity, and power. His current work at the University of Michigan brings together fiction, memoir, and theater. At the University of Michigan, Rahmani is developing three interconnected creative projects:
The Divine Comedy of Immigrants is a collection of short stories about refugees and immigrants navigating the absurdities, humiliations, transformations, and occasional beauty of displacement. Combining realism, satire, surrealism, and allegory, the stories examine migration beyond the conventional narrative of departure and arrival: what happens to a person’s education, language, profession, dignity, body, and sense of self after crossing a border?
Rahmani is also writing a memoir tracing his intellectual and personal journey from Algeria to exile in the United States. Rather than functioning solely as autobiography, the project examines how a writer attempts to understand his own life while living through censorship, persecution, displacement, institutional environments, cultural transition, and the reconstruction of identity in exile.
Once a week, Rahmani dedicates focused time to developing and rehearsing Reagan’s Flip Flops, a one-man theatrical performance that brings his literary voice onto the stage. Reagan’s Flip-Flops is a one-man play about an immigrant in America who finds a pair of flip-flops that once belonged to former President Ronald Reagan. To his surprise, the flip-flops begin speaking to him in Reagan’s voice. An unusual relationship develops between the immigrant and the talking flip-flops, creating a surreal and humorous encounter between immigration, American history, and the American Dream.
Anouar Rahmani is the William and Sally Searle Research Scholar as part of the Institute for the Humanities' Scholars in Exile program.
