News and Announcements

Professor Efe Khayyat has been selected for the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award in Comparative Literature in academic year 2026–2027.

During the Fulbright term, Prof. Khayyat will undertake a research project on literary representations of the natural environment in early modern Middle Eastern contexts in Türkiye.

April 24 is Rutgers Giving Day! Support transformative global learning by contributing to our study abroad scholarship fund for students in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures. Your donation helps remove financial barriers, allowing talented students to immerse themselves in the languages, cultures, and communities they study—experiences that deepen understanding, broaden perspectives, and shape future leaders. Every gift, no matter the size,...

The journal Modernism/modernity, co-edited by Prof. Anjali Nerlekar and Faye Hammill, won the 2025 Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Best Digital Feature Award for its digital cluster on Hope Mirrlees’ poem Paris. The award recognizes the publication's notable digital contribution to literary scholarship.

Prof. Alidou and Prof. Sarah Tobias will lead the 2026-2027 IRW Seminar "Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life."

he IRW is a multidisciplinary center within Rutgers University’s School of Arts and Sciences that promotes feminist scholarship, activism, and community engagement on topics related to women, gender, and sexuality. IRW supports interdisciplinary research projects, hosts events and lectures, and collaborates with other Rutgers units such as the Institute for Women’s...

The Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures mourns the passing of our colleague, Lydia Quayson, Lecturer of Twi, who died in December 2025. She served as a valued member of our department for many years.

Quayson taught Twi language courses from the elementary to the advanced level, inspiring generations of students with her expertise, dedication, and passion for language education. She was widely respected for her generosity and deeply admired by...

Prof. Ousseina Alidou has been awarded The African Studies Association 2025 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for her latest work, Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders(University of Michigan Press, 2024).  

In their commendation, the Selection Committee stated that they

…found Protest Arts to be an important book that reimagines the importance of gender to the study of popular arts to highlight how creative works engage with...

Prof. Anjali Nerlekar’s The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (co-edited with Ulka Anjaria, Oxford UP 2024) has been shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for Editions, Anthologies, and Collections published in 2023 or 2024.

Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures   (Oxford University Press, 2024

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a magisterially comprehensive and expertly edited compendium on its subject....

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, co-edited by Ulka Anjaria and our own Anjali Nerlekar, has been awarded the 2025 René Wellek Prize for Best Edited Essay Collection by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). This prestigious prize recognizes outstanding books in comparative literature that cross national, linguistic, geographic, or disciplinary borders. The citation for the award can be found at the ACLA link.

The handbook, published by Oxford University Press in...

The Hindi-Urdu Language and Culture Association, otherwise known as HULCA, is a space for students who are interested in Hindi and Urdu languages. Students are presented with an opportunity to learn the language, explore its literature, and celebrate its culture while connecting with other Hindi-Urdu enthusiasts. Students are able to engage and explore both languages outside of the classroom and create social connections with their peers. Their next event, “Khanay Shanay Night,” is a recipe...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin is holding a Middle Eastern Science Fiction translation contest open to all translators of languages from the MENA region.

The winner will receive $1000 and the winning translation will be published in the fall issue of Y’alla: A Texan Journal of Middle Eastern Literature. Y’alla is a biannual publication that features fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction translated from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and other...

The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, at the John W. Kluge Center of the US Library of Congress, focuses on the history and cultures of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Professor Alidou will be using the immense foreign language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library of Congress to pursue her research on "Life and Being Human in West Sahel African Women's Cultural and Literary Narratives."

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press) examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in...

The Institute for Research on Women is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, activism, and community at Rutgers. Programming includes a weekly seminar for faculty and graduate students, the IRW Distinguished Lecture Series, and an undergraduate learning community—all tied to an annual theme. In 2024-2025 the IRW Seminar theme is “Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters.”