Research Associate
Phone: +961 1 359279
Email: Halabi@orient-institut.org
Zeina G. Halabi is a writer, editor, and scholar of modern Arabic literature. Her research explores the contemporary legacy of 20th century emancipatory traditions, texts, and figures, with a regional focus on Egypt and the Levant. She is the author of The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and articles in journals including Journal of Arabic Literature (2014)and Middle Eastern Literatures (2016),as well as in edited volumes and anthologies including The Arab Renaissance (2018) and Commitment and Beyond: Reflections On/Of the Political in Arabic Literature Since the 1940s (2015). She is the editor of a three-volume anthology of contemporary Arabic literature in translation for the Review of Small Literature and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature (forthcoming). Her work has been supported by the EUME postdoctoral fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien (2012-13), DAAD (2021), the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2018-21), and Civitella Ranieri (2025). Her popular writing in Arabic and English includes essays and translations in alternative pan-Arab and international media platforms on topics ranging from literature to contemporary music and visual culture. She has served on boards of cultural institutions, as a juror for literary awards granted by pan-Arab cultural institutions, and currently serves as Research Associate at the Orient Institute in Beirut and the Arabic editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.
Probes the notion of the future and the aspirations, imaginations, and anxieties it has triggered in Arabic literature since the Nahda to the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings. It explores the ways in which Arab writers, of different historical generations and literary sensibilities, have imagined the future, on which they have projected competing narratives for emancipation. Crossing different literary genres and national spaces, the literary works she examines reveal how the future, which had been driven by hopes for salvation, was imbued with despair in the aftermath of military coups and failed revolutions. The book draws on valuable scholarship pertaining to the future, but aims to offer more: It retraces the literary iterations of the concept of the future since the 19th century to the present. As such, the book does not study the literary articulations of the future in well-demarcated historical periods; It is not restricted to the present and its own anxieties about the future; nor is it concerned with historicizing futurist literary genres and tracing their adaptations to historical junctures. Rather, it builds on available scholarship that touches on these three distinct approaches to the notion of the future, but is unique in drawing on an interdisciplinary, cross-generic, and comparative approach traversing two centuries of Arabic literature, in order to understand how Arab writers have imagined their futures and constructed selfhood.
Author: Zeina Halabi
The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation . Edinburgh
Allan, Michael and Halabi, Zeina G. (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature . Cambridge University Press, 2026.