Nadia Backleh
Nadia Hajal - Backleh: PhD researcher, English and Comparative Literary Studies
Supervisors: Prof. Paulo de Medeiros, Prof. Graeme Macdonald
Academic Qualification:
MA in Critical Theory, University of Kent (UK), and MA in Gender, Law and Development, Birzeit University (Palestine)
Funding: Doctoral College access scholarship - Sanctuary (Warwick)
Email: Nadia.Backleh@warwick.ac.uk
My PhD Research:
I am researching "World Literature and Migration: Questioning Neoliberal Cultures and Modalities of Resistance under Globalization". Situated at the nexus of literature and theory, migration and labour studies, colonial/postcolonial studies, and global scholarship of empire, the project examines how world literature since the 1980s has engaged with the archetypal condition of migration in the historical conjuncture of global capitalism. Specifically, how fiction and non-fiction register: (1) cultures of migration, (2) predicaments of global capitalism and empire on migrant masses, and (3) modalities through which migrants seek a way out of their dire conditions. Methodologically, the research anchors itself to materialism. It brings a literary-critical eye to examine related scholarly debates. And it argues for the centrality of capital and class analysis to realistically understand migrants' conditions apart from neoliberal mythologies as well as to concretize the potentials and limitations of the registered spaces and modalities of resistance.
Teaching:
- Birzeit University (until 2023): "Introduction to Feminist Theories", "Women in Arab Society", "English Academic Writing", "Modern and Contemporary European Civilization", "Modern and Contemporary Arab Thought", and "Psychology of Self and Identity".
- University of Warwick: "Epic into Novel" (2024-25)
Conferences:
- October 2024. "The Socialism of the Anti-Colonial Feminist Narrations of Sahar Khalifeh: The Pre-Oslo Novels". Warwick HRC conference on Radical Traditions. University of Warwick, UK.
- November 2023. "Narrating Labour Migration in Global China: Between Neoliberal and Socialist Paradigms". Historical Materialism Twentieth Conference 2023. SOAS, UK.
- May 2022. "Dispossession and Labor Migration in Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Non-fiction Scattered Sand (2012)" in “Dispossession: A symposium on Marxism, Culture, Extraction, and Enclosure”, funded by the Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick, UK.
- April 2022. "Thinking Global Migration, Borders and Politics of Cultural Hybridity" in “Somewhere in Between: Borders and Borderlands” conference, organized by the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, UK.
Publications:
(2024). "Towards Rethinking the Politics of Global Cultures of Migration", in Navigating Borders: Perspectives on Migration and identity. London: Interdisciplinary Discourses. pp.46-68.
(2024). "The Question of Freedom, Democracy and Human Dignity at the “End of History”: Lea Ypi’s Free", Book Review, in Romman Cultural Magazine (Arabic).