Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
Professor of Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature, Department of English
Associated Faculty, Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages
Chair of the Department of English: 2014–17
D.Phil. University of Oxford 2005
M.A. Free University of Berlin 2000
Dr. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature in the Department of English and an associated faculty in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. She is the recipient of the 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar Lüst Research Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange and the 2008 Annemarie Schimmel Research Award. In 2017/18, she was an invited resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2005 and her MA from the Free University of Berlin in 2000. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature in global perspective and closely intersects with cultural and intellectual history. Interdisciplinary in scope, it engages with life writing/(auto)biography, memory studies, literature archives, global modernism, gender studies, interrelations of word and image, book culture/art, and aesthetics and politics.
PUBLICATIONS
Authored books:
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Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World, eds. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
https://www.routledge.com/Archives-Museums-and-Collecting-Practices-in-the-Modern-Arab-World/Mejcher-Atassi-Schwartz/p/book/9781138279681- Helmut Mejcher,
Zeithorizonte im Nahen Osten: Studien und Miszellen zur Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (articles by Helmut Mejcher collected and presented to him for his 75th birthday), eds. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Marianne Schmidt-Dumont, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012.
https://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/978-3-643-11514-0
Courses she has taught include:
ENGL 301A Introduction to Bibliography and Research Methods
ENGL 306AD/ARAB351Q Wor(l)ds of Refuge: Literature in an Age of Postmigration
ENGL 306N Word and Image
ENGL 306X The Essay: Histories, Theories, Practices
ENGL 309A World Literature: Arab Modernism
ENGL 311B Literature and Material Culture: Archival Research in the Arab World
ENGL 217 The Novel
ENGL 221 Introduction to Literary Theory
ENGL 233 Introduction to Translation: Histories, Theories, Practices (Arabic–English)
ENGL 242C World Literature: Global Modernism (Focus: Arab World)
ENGL 262 Translating Life Writing (Arabic-English)
ENGL 292 Capstone Seminar for Lit. Majors: Literary Biography