Linda Istanbulli
Education
Professional Bio
I am a scholar of modern Arab and Arabic literatures and cultures. My current book, Speculative Polyphony in Contemporary Syrian Fiction, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in the Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature series, examines how contemporary Syrian fiction interrogates inherited forms of authority and rethinks questions of gender, ethics, and collective belonging. At the graduate level, I teach courses in comparative Arab and Arabic literature and criticism, literary and cultural theory, and genre studies. At the undergraduate level, I teach courses on women and world literature, literary criticism and theory, postcolonial literature and culture, migration and exile, and comparative and world literature. I am a recipient of Penn State’s George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Areas of Specialization
- Modern Arab and Arabic Literatures and Cultures
- Comparative Middle Eastern Literatures and Cultures
- Literature, Religion, and Secular Modernity
- Gender and Feminist Theory in the Arab World
- Postcolonial Theory
Selected Publications
Speculative Polyphony in Contemporary Syrian Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.
“Cultural Translation and the Neoliberal Landscape of Glocalized Media.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 18.1 (2025): 55–75.
“Subjectivity, Agency, and the Question of Gender in Fadwa Tuqan’s Post-Naksa Poetry.” Middle Eastern Literatures 26.2 (2024): 174–194.
“Mihyar’s Precarious Journey: Imagining the Intellectual in Modern Syrian Literature.” Contemporary Levant 7.1 (2022): 5–21.
“Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should.” Journal of Arabic Literature 52.1–2 (2021): 202–227.