ISITA welcomes Xena Amro as the Institute’s part-time graduate assistant for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Xena is a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in Middle East and North African Studies. She is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant Garde and Modernist Studies. Her research interests include Islamic manuscripts, travelogues, global modernism, translation studies, modern Arabic literature, and twentieth-century European novels.
Xena has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the Lebanese American University and a master’s degree in English literature from the American University of Beirut. Her master’s thesis, entitled “Paris in 1855 and 1922: Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and James Joyce,” employed global modernist theories to investigate how Al-Sāq ‘alā l-sāq (Leg over Leg) already accomplishes many things claimed for one of the central texts of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), such as experiments in narrative form, its polyglot linguistic texture, and breadth of cultural and literary references. Her research focused on the concept of foreignness, whereby a native language is made foreign to its own readers. She has contributed a chapter to an edited volume on al-Shidyāq to be published soon with Barbara Winckler in Reichert Verlag.
In June 2022, the Comparative Literary Studies Department recognized Xena’s work with the “Best Graduate Seminar Paper” prize for her article, “In Search of Lost Proust: The Translator and the Comparatist.” Furthermore, her paper “Global Modernism and Foreign Readers: al-Shidyāq and Joyce in Paris” was accepted at the 2022 American Comparative Literature Association.
In 2022, Xena also received an award from the John Hunwick Research Fund, administered by ISITA, which she used to attend the Summer School