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Xena Amro

Home Department: Middle East and North African Studies

Area(s) of Research Interest: pre-modern literature, Islamic philosophy, archival practices, travelogues, global modernism, translation studies, Nahda literature, and critical theory.

Xena Amro is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in Middle East and North African Studies. She is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies. She is a graduate assistant at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, and she is also the coordinator of the Language Curricula and Gender working group at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. 

Xena was awarded Best Graduate Seminar Paper for her article, “In Search of Lost Proust: The Translator and the Comparatist." Furthermore, her paper, “Global Modernism and Foreign Readers: al-Shidyāq and Joyce in Paris” was accepted at the 2022 American Comparative Literature Association. Xena was also awarded the John Hunwick Research Fund from the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa. In 2022, she attended the Summer School on Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World with Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS) at Universiteit Leiden. 

Xena has a B.A. degree in English Literature from the Lebanese American University, which included an exchange semester at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City as the Global UGRAD scholarship recipient. Her M.A. degree in English Literature from the American University of Beirut entailed an exchange year, funded by an Erasmus+ scholarship, at Uppsala University in Sweden. 

Xena has a chapter contribution in an edited volume on al-Shidyāq to be published with Barbara Winckler in Reichert Verlag. She is the organizer of the translation symposium, "Translation Practices Across Institutional Borders: From the Scholar to the Public," which took place in January 2023, co-sponsored by the 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.

She is currently the Graduate Student Representative for the Comparative Literary Studies program. Additionally, she serves on the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) Advisory Board as the elected Graduate Student Representative.