Nahrain Al-Mousawi, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Comparative Humanities
School Of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
nahrain.almousawi@ahss.habib.edu.pk

Education:

  • Ph.D. Comparative Literature, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
  • M.A. Middle Eastern Studies/Arabic Studies, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN
  • B.A. English Literature, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Teaching Experience:

  • Assistant Professor, English Literature, University of Balamand, Lebanon
  • Postdoctoral Fellow of Modern Arabic Literature & Culture & Visiting Faculty, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
  • Teaching Fellow, Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles

Courses Taught:

Undergraduate – Literature & Writing

  • Global Speculative Fiction
  • Migration Literature
  • Introduction to World Literature
  • Introduction to Literary & Critical Theory
  • Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature
  • Undocumented: Arab & Afro-Arab Migrant Narratives
  • Rhetoric & Communication (Rhetoric of the Everyday)

Graduate – Literature

  • Undocumented
  • Postcolonial Literature & Theory
  • Transnational Literature & Criticism

Research Interests:

  • world literature
  • Arabic & Anglophone literature of the Middle East & Africa
  • postcolonial studies
  • transnational studies

Biography:

Nahrain Al-Mousawi received her PhD from UCLA in Comparative Literature, with a focus on Arabic and English literature, as well as postcolonial and transnational literature and criticism. She has postdoc’d and taught at universities in the US, Germany, Lebanon, and now Pakistan.

Her book The Two-Edged Sea (2021) explores narratives of undocumented migration from Africa across the Mediterranean. Beyond academia, she has written on popular and literary culture from the MENA region and has had her work published in Al Jazeera, The National, Globe and Mail, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications.

Selected Awards and Accomplishments:

  • Modern Arabic Literature & Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
  • EUME Postdoctoral Fellowship, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures, Freie Universtät Berlin

Selected Publications:

Book:

  1. The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2021).

Articles/Book Chapters:

  1. “Estranging Labor: The Gulf, Capital, & the Fantastic in Temporary People,” Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South, eds Gigi Adair & Carly McLaughlin (New York: Routledge) [Forthcoming: February 2025]
  2. “Between Mediterranean Realism & Fantasy: Migrant Divides”, Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, eds Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, & Carly McLaughlin (New York: Routledge, 2024)
  3. “Death at the Border: Making & Unmaking the Migrating Body”, Forum Transregionale Studien Essay Series 2016, no. 2 (Fall 2016)
  4. “Aesthetics of Migration: Street Art in Mediterranean Border Zones,” Logoi: Journal of Philosophy (Rivista di filosofia), English & Italian (Summer 2016)
  5. “Securing the Self from Security,” Emancipatory Series, DPR Barcelona Books (Spring 2014)
  6. “The Diamond Pipeline: Africa & the Arab World”, Postcolonial Text 7, no. 2 (Summer 2012)
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