Biography

Dr. Rami Abu Shehab is a Palestinian critic, poet, and academic, born in Zarqa, Jordan, in 1974. His work moves through literary criticism, cultural studies, and postcolonial discourse, with a particular attention to the literature of trauma, the narratives of exile and diaspora, and questions of identity in literature and cinema.

Formation

He completed a bachelor's degree in Arabic Language and Literature at Mu'tah University in Jordan, a master's degree at the Hashemite University with distinction and honours, and a doctorate in modern literary criticism at the Institute of Arab Research and Studies in Cairo in 2012, graduating with first-class distinction. He is currently a professor at Qatar University.

In writing

Alongside his academic work, Abu Shehab writes a weekly cultural column for Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London, and has published dozens of essays, studies, and poems across the Arabic press. He is the author of some ten critical books and two poetry collections, in which the sensibility of the poet meets the rigour of the critic.

Recognition

His book The Lingering Trace and the Feint: Postcolonial Discourse in Contemporary Arabic Criticism received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2014, and he was also honoured with the Philadelphia Award for best authored book. He has served on literary juries, among them the Al-Multaqa Prize for the Short Story in Kuwait in 2019.

The project

Abu Shehab works on a single question that branches through all of his books: how does literature produce knowledge about the wound, about exile, about identity? From that question he reads the modern Arabic text as a narrative that resists, that remembers, and that re-imagines itself against discourses larger than it.