Research Associate
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. She was Assistant Professor of Arabic literature at the University of North Carolina and Associate Professor at American University of Beirut. Her research has been supported by the EUME postdoctoral fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien (2012-13), DAAD (2021), and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2018-21). 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 music and visual culture. She currently serves as the Arabic editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.
My current book project 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.
I. Refereed Publications
Monograph
Halabi, Zeina G. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Articles
Halabi, Zeina G. المنفى الفلسطيني ومآلاته: جبرا إبراهيم جبرا وإيليا سليمان . مجلة الدراسات الفلسطينية Fall 2017 (112): 128-139.
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘The Literary Lives of Umm Kulthūm: Cossery, Ghali, Negm, and the Critique of Nasserism’. Middle Eastern Literatures 19, 1 (2016): 1–22.
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: The Suicide of the Intellectual in Rabī ʿ Jābir’s Rālf Rizqallāh through the Looking Glass’. Journal of Arabic Literature 44, no. 1 (2013): 53–82.
Book Chapters
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘Keeping Silent, or the Silence that Kept Saadallah Wannous’. In On Wannous: Critical Studies on the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, eds. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Robert Myers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021: 59-77.
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment’. In Commitment and Beyond: Reflections On/Of the Political in Arabic Literature Since the 1940s, eds. Georges Khalil and Friederike Pannewick. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert-Verlag, 2015: 156–70.
Translation
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘Selections from Nazira Zeineddine’s al-Sufūr wa-l- Ḥ ijāb’. In The Arab Renaissance: Thought, Literature, Culture: Anthology of Nahda Writings, Edited by Tarek El-Ariss. Washington, DC: Modern Language Association, 2018: 372-392.
II. Other Publications
Anthology Editor
Halabi, Zeina G. Review of Small Literature: Egypt. Zagreb, Croatia: Association Kulturtreger, 2019: 9-12.
Halabi, Zeina G. Review of Small Literature: Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. Zagreb, Croatia: Association Kulturtreger, 2018: 9-12.
Halabi, Zeina G. Review of Small Literature: Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Zagreb, Croatia: Association Kulturtreger, 2017: 9-12.
Review Essays
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘Sex and the Perils of Travelling Authors and Notions’. Review of Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer. What Makes a Man?: Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin. Translated by Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt. Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2015. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 14:1 (2018).
Halabi, Zeina G. ‘In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt’, Michael Allan, Syndicate, goo.gl/E6gwEm (Nov. 2017).
III. Selection of Public Scholarship
‘The Contemporary in Arabic Literature’. World Humanities Report, CHCI, 2023. https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/
‘It Must Be Palestine: Interview with Elia Suleiman’. Safar Journal, Migration, no. 5 (2020): 131-152.
‘Mahmoud Darwish and the Spectre of the Arab Intellectual-Prophet’, Eurozine, shorturl.at/F3579 (December 27, 2019)
‘The Missing Archive of Love’, Regards: Revue des arts du spectacle, no. 22 (2019): 119-126.
