Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ahmad Abu Ahmad is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, where he works across the modern and classical Arabic literary traditions with a focus on Palestinian literature and film. Having completed a B.A. in English and an LL.B. in law at Tel Aviv University, he has been committed to questions of sovereignty and violence in Israel/Palestine as both a student activist and, later, an attorney. Such involvements inform his current research, which examines the intersections of space, language, and memory and attests to the complex politics of linguistic and (inter)cultural contact zones in the project of settler-colonial state-building. For him, translation offers not only a rubric for close textual analysis, but an expanded mode of circulation of meaning both within and outside text, where language functions as a contact zone and a site of asymmetric force and violence.