Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ahmad Abu Ahmad is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. His research is deeply interdisciplinary, engaging Arabic and comparative literature, Palestinian studies, literary multilingualism and the politics of (mis)translation, settler-colonialism and nationalism, critical history, memory and imaginations, visual politics, and violence. He also works in literary translation, and his writings have appeared in Jerusalem Quarterly and SubStance. His dissertation, titled “The Poetics and Politics of Death in Palestinian Literature and Film,” expands our understanding of conditioning Palestinians to precarious lives and irrevocable deaths under Israeli settler colonialism. In parallel, it examines the ways Palestinians uphold deaths that resist finality and anonymity. Innate to his interrogation is qualifying death beyond the biological cessation of life and probing a multiplicity of death in life, and deaths that initiate posthumous continuities. He interrogates the life-death continuum in Palestinian film and prose, with a secondary focus on poetry, examining the touchability of the Palestinian corpse vis-à-vis heterogeneous intimacies, the politics of names and (de)naming, language as structure of and for death (e.g., untranslatability and nonreciprocity), and the politics of seeing/foreseeing death. He holds a B.A. in English and an LLB from Tel Aviv University.