Jenine Abboushi Dallal,
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature
Ph.D. 1996, Harvard University.

I first became interested in comparative literature as an undergraduate at Birzeit University. After completing a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature, I studied comparative literature at Columbia and then at Harvard, where I focused on American, Arabic and French literature.

My dissertation, "The Beauty of Imperialism: Emerson, Melville, Flaubert and al-Shidyaq," examines the concept of aesthetic autonomy within the context of imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas theorists have recently discussed the aesthetic in the local terms of class, this study reconstructs a transnational terrain in which the aesthetic is symbolically expressed through diverse imperial idioms. The study demonstrates the cross-cultural, colonial dynamic that underlies central and abiding western concepts of the aesthetic. At the same time, it illustrates how the convergence of aesthetic and imperial idioms served to both expand and diversify aesthetic possibility and form in American, French and Arabic literature.

A recent article ("Arabic Literature in the marketplace") is part of a second study that compares both western and non-western literary traditions that were self-consciously "forged." The general project concerns the literary legitimation of culture, and it shows how historically specific concepts and genres serve to shape and authorize new "democratic" cultures. My research and teaching interests include North African francophone, Arabic, American and French literatures and cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries, imperialism, ideology, film, literary and cultural theory.