Anastasia Valassopoulos

Specific research interests:

My main area of research is in the postcolonial literature and culture of the Middle East and North Africa. I am also very interested in the wider cultural production and reception of Arab women's film and music, such as the work of Moufida Tlatli and Umm Kulthum. More recently I have begun researching Arab cinema of the 60s and 70s and the impact of other national cinemas on Arab film. I am also interested in the revolutionary cinema of the PLO and the cinema of the Arab Diaspora.

Completed and current research projects:

My first book, Contemporary Arab Women Writers has been out since 2007. Before this I had published articles on Tunisian film, Arab women writers Nawal el-Saadawi, Ahdaf Soueif and Hanan Al-Shaykh as well as Edward Said and Arab culture (Movie Music: The Reader; Research in African Literatures; Critical Survey; After Orientalism). I have explored the role of the female entertainer in Flaubert, Vikram Seth and Naguib Mahfouz in an article for Popular Music and Society (2007) and have also written on Middle Eastern feminism in an article for Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (Palgrave, 2007). A recent essay in the collection  Edward Said: Emancipation and Representation (California University Press, 2010) examines Said's views on popular culture. Recent work centres around Arab feminist writing; Arab-American writing and the articulation of political Islam in Egyptian film.

I have edited a special issue on the subject of 'Arab Feminism' for the journal Feminist Theory(2010) and with my colleague Robert Spencer,  edited a special issue on 'Responses to the War on Terror' for The Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2010). My latest project, 'Arab Cultural Studies', formed the basis of a double special issue for the Journal of Cultural Research (2012) and was also re-published as a book.

Recent publications (2014) include work on the Palestinian resistance movement and cinema and an article written with my colleague Dr. Dalia Mostafa on revolution and music in the Egyptian context.

Some forthcoming articles (2019) will appear in the edited collection The Postcolonal Middle East (EUP; eds Anna Ball and Karim Mattar) and the chapter for the Middle East literature section for the Oxford History of the Novel (OUP, Volume X, ed. Alex Tickell).

I am currently a British Academy Senior Research fellow working on the project ‘Palestine in the Popular Imagination’. See here for more details:

https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/english/research/projects/palestine-in-the-popular-imagination/

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415353557/

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415631174/

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415845687/

My e-mail address is [email protected].

I am currently supervising students working on a range of topics including Arab writing of the Diaspora; Nadine Gordimer; postcolonialism and translation; Palestinian cinema; feminism and film; cultural history of the Hijra; Iraqi womens' writing and the politics of translation; post 9/11 fiction; Empire and Film.