Research Fellow, Raoul Wallenberg Institute
About
Dr. Stephanie Kraver is a scholar of modern Arabic and Hebrew literature who specializes in transcultural exchange, expressions of mourning, trauma theory, and translation. She places Palestinian poetry into conversation with Hebrew and Anglophone works, exploring literary relationships across national borders and poetic traditions. Developing new approaches to understanding literature’s relationship to cultural contexts and history, her current project, Reading Past Difference: Palestinian/Israeli Poetics of Performance and Desire, challenges the linguistic and sociopolitical cleavages that characterize Arab/Jewish writing and identity politics. Her manuscript explicates the archive of two poets: the celebrated Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish and the renowned Israeli writer Dahlia Ravikovitch. The book analyzes the formal features of Darwish’s and Ravikovitch’s poetry alongside a biographical and historical frame. By underscoring acts of translation and transmission between the authors, as well as nodes of transnational solidarity, her manuscript spotlights points of encounter, citation, and designs for political change. The writers whom she studies activate poetic imaginaries to contemplate other worlds and futures. Kraver has contributed to the Journal of Arabic Literature, Penn State University Press, and Cultural Critique.
