Nadia Hajal - Backleh

First-year PhD candidate, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

Academic Qualification:

MA, Critical Theory, University of Kent (Distinction)

MA, Gender, Law and Development, Birzeit University (First Class)

BA, English Language and Literature, Birzeit University

Contact: 

Nadia.Backleh@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis Working Title:

World Literature and Migration: Questioning Neoliberal Cultures and Modalities of Resistance under Globalization

Supervisors:

Professor Paulo de Medeiros - University of Warwick

Professor Graeme Macdonald - University of Warwick

Briefing: 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 cultures of migration, predicaments of global capitalism and empire on migrant masses, and 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 scholarly debates. And it argues for the centrality of capital and class analysis to negate neoliberal mythologies and identify root causalities, which modalities of resistance should target.

Teaching:

• "Introduction to Feminist Theories", Birzeit University.
• "Women in Arab Society", Bizeit University.
• "English Academic Writing", Birzeit University.
• Modern and Contemporary European Civilization, Birzeit University.
• Modern and Contemporary Arab Thought, Birzeity University.
• "Psychology of Self and Identity", Birzeit University.

Conferences:

• 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.

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