News and Announcements

Haberl Charles Photo

Dr. Häberl is an Associate Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL). He was born and raised in the State of New Jersey, where he has lived for most of his life, but received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.

The undergraduate courses he teaches address subjects such as Middle Eastern languages and literatures (including Arabic and Aramaic), folklore, and minorities in the Middle East. These courses include "Crossroads: Classical Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia" and "Introduction to Middle Eastern Folklore".

To learn more about Professor Haberl, please click here.

His most recent book (pictured) is his critical edition, translation, and commentary on the Mandaean Book of John with James McGrath, Ph. D.

Dr. Selim is an Associate Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL).

Dr. Selim is an award-winning literary translator. She is the recipient of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the University of Arkansas Translation of Arabic Literature Award (2012) and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant (2018). She is currently working on an English translation of Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s 1987 novel Sultana.

Her research focuses mainly on modern Arabic Literature in Egypt and the Levant, with a particular interest in narrative genres like the novel and short story; comparative theories of fiction, and the politics of translation practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

To learn more about Professor Selim, please click here.

Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nadha in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) is on the cultural and literary politics surrounding the translation of the novel into Arabic at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Preetha Mani is an Assistant Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL). Her current book project titled "The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method," examines Hindi and Tamil short story writing between the 1930s and 1960s to explore how representations of the Indian woman were used to shape ideas of regional and national identity, and experiences of belonging, in the aftermath of Indian Independence. She teaches undergraduate courses including "Introduction to the Literatures of South Asia" and "Women Writers of South Asia ".

To learn more about Professor Mani, please click here.

Her recent article "What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī" can be found here.

Presented by: Professor Partha Chatterjee

Episode 1: Meg Arenberg is joined by Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor to celebrate the momentous occasion of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize, in her words, "a family win." Owuor talks about Gurnah the man and the mentor, the textures of his writing and how it has influenced her own, and reflects on the cartographic imagination that nourishes both poetry and prose born from the Swahili seas.

The conversation between Owuor and Arenberg is followed by a short reading from By the Sea (2001), one of Gurnah's most poignant depictions of the migrant experience and the rippling effects of colonial violence in the lives of ordinary people. In a few deft strokes, the passage orients us to the layered histories of Zanzibar's encounters with the world in both their raucous beauty and their brutality.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was born in Nairobi, Kenya. She studied English and History at the Kenyatta University, earned a Master of Arts degree at the University of Reading, UK, and an MPhil (Creative Writing) from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. From 2003 to 2005, she was the executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival under the remit of which a literary forum was established. Her short story, The Weight of Whispers, earned her the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003. She is the author of two novels, Dust (2014) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019). Meg Arenberg is a writer, translator and scholar. She is a postdoctoral fellow in AMESALL at Rutgers University and Managing Director of the Radical Books Collective.

The Department of American Studies announces scholarships of up to $300 for declared American Studies or Race and Ethnic Studies (CCRES) minors majoring in Africana Studies, AMESALL, Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (LHCS) or Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) to be awarded in Fall and Spring 2014-15 AY.

The scholarship recognizes declared American Studies or CCRES minors who have demonstrated scholarly promise and commitment to the interdisciplinary study of culture and global diversity.

Lauren Weber for the Wall Street Journal | May 15, 2014

Parents, don’t despair. Even if your child spends four years of college reading Hungarian poetry or delving deep into the Faulkner oeuvre, he or she can still earn a decent salary shortly after packing up the senior-year dorm room.

So says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which reports that the top-paying liberal arts majors for 2014 graduates are foreign languages and literature (average starting salary $46,900) and English ($42,200). The results are based on job offers that students accepted earlier this year and were reported by employers in February 2014 primarily through a variety of government surveys.

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Elementary Swahili Fall 2022

Fantasy Literature Fall 2021

Faculty News

A Relativist View of the Indian Nation

Yvonne Owuor on Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lit. of the Swahili Seas

African Animal Tales

Louise Duus Book Scholarship for American Studies Minors

Foreign Language and Literature Degrees Pay the Most