Education
D.Phil, English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
M.A., English, University of Virginia
M.A., English Literature/Critical Theory, University of Sussex
M.A. Phil. and Lit., University of Warwick
B.A., Philosophy, University College London
Regional and Thematic Interests
West Asia/Middle East
Literature and the Arts
Profile
Karim Mattar is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in postcolonial studies. He received his DPhil in English from the University of Oxford (2013), after earning degrees at UCL (BA, 2003), Warwick (MA, 2004), Sussex (MA, 2005), and Virginia (MA, 2009). Dr. Mattar’s research and teaching interests include Middle Eastern literatures in English, Palestinian literature and culture, the global novel, postcolonial and world literary theory, critical theory (esp. Marxism), and modernism. His work charts a post-Saidian world literary landscape where the political, religious, and gender ideologies that undergird conflict between ‘occidental’ and ‘oriental’ cultures both determine literary circulation, and are mediated through form. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Interventions, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Translation and Literature, and elsewhere, and his co-edited special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on ‘The Global Checkpoint’ is due out in early 2014. He is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled The Middle Eastern Novel in English: Literary Transnationalism after Orientalism, as well as a co-edited volume on The Postcolonial Middle East.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming. The Middle Eastern Novel in English: Literary Transnationalism after Orientalism.
2016. The Postcolonial Middle East, ed. with Anna Ball, Bloomsbury Publishing.
2014. "The Global Checkpoint: 'Rights' of Passage, Performances of Sovereignty," ed. with Daivd Fieni, Special Issue, Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
2014. "Orhan Pamuk and the Limits of Translation: Foreignizing The Black Book for World Literature," Translation and Literature 23.1.
2014. "Out of TIme: Colonial History in Ibrahim Nasrallah's Time of White Horses," Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50.2.
2014. "Mourid Barghouti's Multiple Displacements: Exile and the National Checkpoint in Palestinian Literature," Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.1.
2012. "Re-Reading the 'Rouge State': The Politics of Gender in Anglophone Iranian Literature," Interventions 14.4.
"Re-Reading the Anglo-Arab Novel after Said," Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 10.