Dr Rita Sakr

    English

    Associate Professor

    Iontas Building
    Ground Floor
    Office 0.19B
    (01)
    Biography

    Biography


    I am Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Global Literatures. I joined the Department of English at Maynooth University in January 2018 after being Lecturer in World Literature at Goldsmiths (University of London), and previously, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut (Max Weber Foundation), ESRC “Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research” Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent, and visiting lecturer and fellow at UCD (English and Clinton Institute for American Studies), having completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK. My teaching and research interests include literary and cultural production engaging forced displacement, postcolonialism and decoloniality, Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean studies, modern Arab (including diasporic) literature and film, modern Turkish and Kurdish literature in translation, critical geographies and the environmental humanities, (more-than-)human rights and humanitarianism, peacekeeping and peace-building, and interdisciplinary post-conflict memory studies.
    Among various other publications, I am the author of “Anticipating” the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies (Palgrave) and Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (Continuum; and in paperback, Bloomsbury Academic). I co-edited The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (Routledge) and James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Rodopi).
    I co-directed and co-produced the Research Councils UK-funded documentary film White Flags that focuses on peace-building through memory projects and the arts in post-war Beirut. Screenings and Q&A included: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Being Human Festival, UK; World Poetry Day, Nicosia; Mansion Cultural Centre, Beirut.


    Recent and forthcoming publications focus on literary/cultural production (primarily Arab) at the crossroads of decoloniality, necropolitics, more-than-human rights, the environmental  humanities and experimental literatures of forced displacement. I am currently completing my third monograph titled Arab Displacements: Experimental Literature, Necropolitics and Decolonial Hauntology (under contract with Edinburgh University Press).


    I am the MU Lead on the EU-funded multi-university (lead university UoMalta) Cooperation Partnership in Higher education (postgraduate programme) 'Re-visiting the Mediterranean: Literature, Culture, Environment', 2024-26.

    I was Senior Co-Investigator, with Prof Sinead McGilloway (Principal Investigator-Founder Director of Maynooth Centre for Mental Health and Community Research), on a funded (QFI) research programme, titled SALaM-Ireland (Phase 1: 2020-2023; Phase 2: 2023-24), part of an international collaboration based at the University of Washington in St Louis. This is a mixed-methods engaged research project that sought to assess the psychosocial needs of post-primary school students resettled to Ireland from Arab-majority countries and to identify potential school-based and creative strategies to foster support for this population.

    Recently completed and ongoing research supervision includes: "The Production of Space and its Subversive Functions in Contemporary Lebanese Literature" (Farah Aridi, Goldsmiths, completed); "The Body and the Environment in Contemporary Iraqi Literature" (Reema Hassan, MU, completed); "Literary Representations of the Environmental Impact of the IT Industry" (Florian Radtke, MU:, ongoing) and as mentor for the IRC-funded postdoctoral project "The Language of Refuge" (Edmund Chapman, ongoing).

    From February 2019 to January 2022, I coordinated the MA English: Literatures of Engagement. I co-designed an interdisciplinary, cross-departmental Master of Arts: Cultures of Migration.

    In October 2021, I designed and convened a free online course on "Global Migrant Literature and Culture" that is part of "A Pilot Project to Enhance Equal Participation and Inclusivity in the Virtual Learning Environment",  for which I received funding (with colleagues in the Department of Law) from the MU Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fund and the generous support of Kildare Libraries.


    I am Co-Chair of Maynooth University Sanctuary programme.

    I am co-founder of the Irish Network of Middle Eastern and North African Studies (INMENAS).

    From 2016 to 2019, I was a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association.

    Since January 2022, I have been a member of the Board of Literature Ireland.

    Since 2016, I have been commissioning editor for the Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African (including diasporic) Literatures and Cultures volumes of the Literary Encyclopedia.

    I was a Judge of the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award.

    Since December 2021, I have been a member of the Judging Panel of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.



    Publications Professional Teaching