Beginnings…
The vision for this initiative emerged during the one-day workshop titled “Walter Benjamin and Edward Said and the Critique Beyond Identity” that took place at the American University in Cairo on April 15, 2016. This one-day workshop, that Sami Khatib, Adam Talib, and Hakem Al-Rustom organized, grew out of the partnership between the Theory and Practice Workshop (co-founded with Ananya Chakravarti) at the American University in Cairo and the Center for the Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut with the support of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Initiative Assistant
Raya Naamneh is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are critical decolonial and settler colonial theories as well as gender and sexuality analyses in the context of Palestinian and North African Arabic literature.