Join us as we interview professor of modern Arabic literature at the University of Chicago Ghenwa Hayek on our afikra Conversations series on December 15th. Ghenwa is a scholar of modern Arabic literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her work deals with the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. Hayek makes use of the formal techniques of literary scholarship to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world. Her first book, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature, traces the modes of imagining the city of Beirut in Lebanese fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present, using an interdisciplinary engagement with literary and cultural studies, critical geography and studies of nationalism and identity.

Date: Tuesday, December 15th
Time: 12PM NYC | 5PM London | 7PM Beirut