is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature. She specializes in modern Arabic literature with particular interest in questions of loss, mourning, and dissidence in contemporary literature and visual culture. Her first book, ‘The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) examines the depiction of Arab intellectuals in post-1990s fiction and film. She is working on her second book project provisionally entitled ‘Excavating the Present: History, Power, and the Arab Archive’, in which she explores archival practices in contemporary literature.
Like a prophet, Mahmoud Darwish is positioned between the tragic past of the Palestinian nakba, the present of occupation and exile, and hopes for a liberated future. Zeina G. Halabi places him in the context of the Arab enlightenment and the post-Arab Spring world to offer Palestinian liberation as a way of redeeming all humanity.