COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Xena Amro is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies with a focus on pre-modern Arabic literature, literary epistles, Islamic philosophy, skepticism, and nineteenth-century travelogues. Her home department is Middle East and North African Studies, and she is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies. She also serves as the graduate assistant at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa and chairs the graduate student committee on the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Advisory Board.

Her professional experience includes serving as an editing assistant at the Journal of Arabic Literature and coordinating the Language Curricula and Gender working group at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

In 2024, Xena was awarded the Paris Program in Critical Theory fellowship hosted by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, as well as the John Hunwick Research Fund from the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, a grant she had also received in 2022. In 2023, she earned a scholarship to participate in the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. In 2022, she was recognized with the Best Graduate Seminar Paper award for her article, "In Search of Lost Proust: The Translator and the Comparatist." That same year, she attended the Summer School on Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World at Leiden University’s Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). 

Xena holds a B.A. in English Literature from the Lebanese American University, where she spent an exchange semester at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City as a Global UGRAD scholarship recipient. She earned her M.A. in English Literature from the American University of Beirut, which included a year of study at Uppsala University in Sweden through an Erasmus+ scholarship.

In January 2023, Xena organized the symposium Translation Practices Across Institutional Borders: From the Scholar to the Public, co-sponsored by Comparative Literary Studies, the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.