Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. She holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and an M.A. from the Free University of Berlin. In 2017-18, she was an invited Fellow in Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin. She is an advisory board member of the Orient Institute Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation and of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. Her research centers on modern Arabic literature, book culture, writers’ libraries, archival and museum studies, cultural history and memory, and aesthetics and politics.

Her publications include Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books ed. with May Muzaffar (2016); Reading across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012); Museums, Archives and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World ed. with John Pedro Schwartz (2012); Writing a ‘Tool for Change’: ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered (ed.) in MIT EJMES Vol. 7 (2007); in addition to book chapters and articles in academic journals, such as Art History, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of World Literature. She is currently working on a biography of the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and an edited volume on the Syrian playwright and public intellectual Sa’dallah Wannous.