Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture
About
On Leave Fall 2022 & Winter 2023
Carol Bardenstein is an Associate Professor of Arabic Language & Culture and Comparative Literature. Her teaching and research focuses primarily on Arabic literary and cultural expression of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Her scholarship has taken up topics such as translation and the cultural encounter between Europe and the Arab World (in her book Translation and Transformation in Modern Arabic Literature: The Indigenous Assertions of Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal), contested symbols in the Arab-Israeli conflict (in her articles “Threads of Memory in Discourses of Rootedness: Of Trees, Oranges and Prickly-Pear Cactus in Palestine/Israel,” and “Trees, Forests and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory,”), the politics of ‘passing’ in Palestinian and Israeli cinema, (“Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema”) and the cookbook memoirs of Middle Eastern exiles and immigrants (“Beyond Univocal Baklava: Deconstructing Food-as-Ethnicity and the Ideology of Homeland in Diana Abu Jaber’s The Language of Baklava,” and “Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory and Collective Memory in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles.”).
She has taught all levels of Arabic language at U-M, and her other courses focus on such specific topics as “The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Middle Eastern Literature and Film,” “Gender and Representation in the Modern Middle East,” “Middle Eastern Memoirs,” and “Collective Memory.”
