Office: Denison 295
Office Hours: By appointment
Karim Mattar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His work addresses the problematic of world literature within the context of global capitalist modernity. In his writings and in the classroom, he deploys a range of comparative, postcolonial, and Marxist critical approaches to assess how the dialectics of modernity are registered in and engaged by literary and cultural texts from around the world. As reflected in his two current book projects, this inquiry is at present largely focalized around the Middle East. He is at work on a monograph, Specters of World Literature: Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East, and a co-edited volume, The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming; with Anna Ball). His other research and teaching interests include modernism, the global novel, literatures of global crisis, the Israel / Palestine conflict, and critical theory. He is fluent in Arabic, and has a working competency in French, German, Turkish, and Persian.
Karim’s articles have appeared in Interventions, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Translation and Literature, English Language Notes, boundary 2, and elsewhere. He has edited or co-edited two journal special issues, on “The Global Checkpoint” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50.1 (2014); with David Fieni) and “Cartographies of Dissent” (English Language Notes, 52.2 (2014)). In 2012, he co-convened the first ever “Oxford Palestine Film Season” with Anna Ball and Mohamed-Salah Omri. He is on the editorial board of English Language Notes and is a member of the MLA Global Arab and Arab American Forum executive committee.
Karim completed his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013. He was the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award for his thesis. Previously, he earned degrees at UCL (B.A. Philosophy, 2003); Warwick (M.A. Philosophy and Literature, 2004); Sussex (M.A. English / Critical Theory, 2005); and Virginia (M.A. English, 2009).