American Univesity of Beirut

Zeina Tarraf

Zeina Tarraf is an assistant professor in the media studies program. Her research and teaching interests lie within the fields of media and cultural studies with a specialization in feminist theories of affect, violence, memory, film and visual culture, and an area focus on the Middle East and the Global South more generally. In her current book project, she mobilizes feminist theories of affect to analyze how various processes of mediation and shifting media environments are implicated in the nexus of affective dynamics and modes of publicity that inform and animate the multiple, crisis-laden presents that Lebanon has experienced since the outbreak of its fifteen-year civil war up until its latest crisis.

She is also working on second project that examines the politics and technologies of recognition that facilitate the production and circulation of Middle Eastern cinema in Western markets and festivals. This project ultimately aims to investigate emerging transnational films in the Middle East as sites through which ​we can reconceptualize the relationship between the global and the local.​

RESEARCH INTERESTS​

Memory and Affect
Visual Cultural Studies
War, Violence, and the Media
Film Festivals

COURSES TAUGHT​

MCOM 203: Arab Media & Society 

MCOM 220: Popular Culture
MCOM 221: War and Media
MCOM 222: Introduction to Visual Culture Studies 

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Tarraf, Zeina. “(Re)negotiating Belonging: Nostalgia and Popular Culture in Postwar Lebanon." Intercultural Studies 41.3 (2020).

Tarraf, Zeina. “Haunting and the Neoliberal Encounter in Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day." Cultural Dynamics 29.1-2 (2017): 39-62.​

Tarraf, Zeina. “The Attack: Doueiry's Depoliticization of Trauma in the Transposition from Literature to Film." What Happened? Visual Representations of Trauma and Healing. Ed. Danielle Shaub and Elspeth McInnes. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2019. 19-33.​

EDUCATION:​​

PhD University of Alberta
MA McMaster University
BA American University of Beirut​

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