Hakim Abderrezak

Hakim Abderrezak is associate professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, where he is affiliated faculty in the doctoral program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, the interdepartmental graduate minor in Moving Image Studies, the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the Program in Religious Studies. Abderrezak earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2006. He specializes in Mediterranean and Migration Studies, and works on forced migration in particular. He is the author of Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music, which, along with a major part of his other publications, tackles representations of unauthorized sea crossings in literary and artistic works that have appeared in Arabic, Berber, French, Italian and Spanish. In 2013 he organized “Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migrations in the Global Age,” the first US-based interdisciplinary symposium on irregular migrations, bringing together a wide array of distinguished scholars working across national languages in the humanities and social sciences. Abderrezak has contributed chapters and published articles on a variety of themes and concepts, including illiterature (narratives focusing on the clandestine journey across the Mediterranean Sea), and the seametery (the Mediterranean as a deadly site), in such journals as SITES: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Expressions Maghrébines and the Journal of North African Studies. In addition, he has co-edited a special issue of Expressions Maghrébines on literary works produced in and about North Africa in languages other than French and Arabic.