Kifah Hanna is Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture Studies and the Head of the Arabic section. Her research and teaching interests broadly include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Arabic literature, gender and sexuality, queer theory, (trans-)cultural studies, cinema studies, war literature, comparative literature, and world literature. She is the author of Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her work appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. She is currently at work on a single–authored book manuscript which examines queer cultural productions of the Arab world at the turn of the 21st century.

Professor Hanna’s scholarly research informs her teaching pedagogy as she encourages her students to challenge perceived notions of gender and sexuality in their examinations of Arabic literature, culture, and cinema.

Books:

• Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 
  

Selected Articles:

• “Queerness and the Cosmopolitan.” Journal of Intercultural Studies (JICS), Special Issue: “Intercultural Mobilities in Central and West Asian Contexts” 42.6 (Oct. 2021): 700-716.
• “Crises of Masculinity in Huda Barakat’s War Literature.” In Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse. Eds. Mohja Kahf and Nadine Sinno. Cairo: AUC Press, 2021 (87-101).
• “Huda Barakat: Queer Literature –of Arabic.” Journal of World Literature, Special Issue: “What is World Literature - of Arabic?” 2.3 (2017): 377-393.
  

Selected Presentations:

• “How do we say “Queer” in Arabic? Language and the Challenge of Representation.” Modern Language Association’s International Symposium. University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, June 2022.
• “Queer Subjectivities and the New Arabic Canon.” The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting (virtual), April 2021.
• “Cultural Intersections in Emerging Queer Arabic Literature.” The 4th Intl. Conference in Language, Linguistics, Literature and Translation. Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, Feb. 2020.
• “Memory, Queerness, and the Cosmopolitan.” The 2nd Intl. Central and West Asia and Diasporas Research Network (CWADRN) Conference, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, July 2018.