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Ghenwa Hayek

Middle Eastern Studies
Ghenwa Hayek in blue shirt

Ghenwa Hayek is an Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, focusing on literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. She investigates the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, specifically Lebanon. Her work is guided by an interest in using the formal techniques of literary scholarship and emergent cultural genres (novels, film, comics, video games) to nuance and complicate understandings of the processes through which cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world.

She is the author of Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014) which focuses on imaginings of Beirut in Lebanese fiction from the emergence of the city as an Ottoman provincial capital through the present. The book explores the anxieties of belonging to the city and the nation through interdisciplinary engagement with affect studies, critical geography, and studies of nationalism and identity.

Currently, her work explores the affective impact of a century of ongoing emigration on Lebanese culture (c.1860-present), and the imaginaries and grammars that have been mobilized to express it across a wide range of cultural forms – from prose, to poetry, to cinema. She argues that diaspora is not a monolithic experience for emigrants nor their compatriots, but it is instead a complex constellation of experiences that produce particular cultural and social resonances at home and abroad. Her archive reveals how the Lebanese national imaginary has yoked Lebanon and its African diaspora together, exposing a racial dialectic that has been used to sustain anxieties about the nation and national belonging.

Read more about Ghenwa Hayek on the Department of Middle Eastern Studies website.