Assistant Professor

Comparative Literature, Arabic, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies

Ammar Naji is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Arabic at Colorado College. He holds a joint position in the Comparative Literature program and the program in Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (AIMES). He is the advisor for the thematic minor in Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and the study of Arabic language at the college.

His research and teaching interests include Comparative and World Literatures, Diaspora and Migration, Postcolonial Studies, the Black Diaspora beyond the Black Atlantic, Global Anglophone and Anglophone-Arab Literature, Arab-American and U.S. Ethnic Studies, Modern Arabic Literature, Comparative Race Studies, Ethnic Writing in the Arab World and North Africa, Islam, New Media Studies, Travel Writing and Translation.

Ammar is a native of Yemen and he holds a B.A. in Arabic and English Studies from Hodeida University in the Republic of Yemen. He came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and completed an M.A in English at the University of Nevada, and a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a doctoral minor in Middle Eastern studies, Comparative Literature and Translation.

Some of his publications have appeared in scholarly venues, including Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (an edited book from Routledge in the UK 2016); the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; Ariel; Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and the Newsletter of Postcolonial Studies Association.

Dr. Naji's current book project, Decentering Diaspora: Contemporary Anglophone-Arab and Arab Literature in the World, offers an unconventional concept of diaspora that pushes the boundaries of diaspora scholarship and the focus on circulation, mobility and transnational reception in the study of global anglophone and world literatures. Juxtaposing the views of immigrant Arab writers in the U.K. and the U.S. with the transnational visions of Arab authors writing diasporic narratives inside their homelands in the Arab Gulf and North Africa, he argues that contemporary Arab writing presents a worldly cartography of diaspora that is no longer defined by the modern nation-state and the conventional parameters of postcolonial migration to the Western world. The understudied emergence of diaspora writing inside Arab homelands elucidates an important aspect of recent Arab revolutions (known as the Arab Spring) and the shifting contingencies of race, ethnicity, language and belonging in the region.

 

 

Regular Classes

Read about one of Professor Naji's newest classes being offered in the fall of 2020 here.

List of Comparative Literature and Theory Courses:

CO 320 / ENG 280 (Advanced Theories in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies)

CO 210 / ENG 250 (Literary Theory and Criticism)

CO 200 / ENG 280 (Debating World Literature Past and Present)

CO 391 / ENG 306 (Current Theories in Postcolonial Migration and Diaspora Studies)

CO 391 / ENG 306 (Advanced Theories in Diaspora and Postcolonialism)

CO 200 / ENG 280 (Introduction to Anglophone-Arab Writing)

CO 200 / ENG 280 (Introduction to Arab-American Literature)

CO 100 / ENG 150 (Introduction to Comparative Literature)

CO 210 / ENG 250 (Introduction to Critical Theory)

CO 200 / ENG 280 (The Muslim and Arab Diaspora)