Translation as Research

Ahmad Diab is Assistant Professor of modern Arabic literature in the Near Eastern Studies Department at UC Berkeley. He received his B.A. from Damascus University, majoring in English Literature. His teaching and research interests are twentieth and twenty-first century Arabic literature, translation studies and Middle Eastern cinema. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his PhD dissertation at NYU; it analyzes literary and filmic representations of Arabs in Palestinian cultural production. He has translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Muhammad Al-Maghout and is currently compiling an anthology of new Syrian poetry.

Anneka Lenssen is Assistant Professor of global modern art in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where her research and teaching interests include modern painting and contemporary visual culture in the Middle East. Her anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, which she co-edited with Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, will be published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this March.

Kathy Zarur is a Lecturer in Visual Studies at the California College of Arts, a curator, an educator, and an arts organizer with a focus on the art and growing museum industry in the Middle East. She was Artistic Director of Teaching Art of the Middle East and Islamic World,a two-day conference and pedagogy workshop held at the de Young Museum and San Francisco State University. Recent exhibitions include Where Is Here (co-curated with Jacqueline Francis, Museum of the African Diaspora, 2017) and Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back (co-curated with Santhi Kavuri-Bauer and San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery, 2017).