Shir Alon
9 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Shir Alon is an assistant professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, where she teaches courses on modern Middle Eastern literatures and cultures and on literary theory. She studies Arabic and Hebrew cultural production, and especially literature, against changing political and social dynamics in the modern Middle East. Her first book, Static: Middles Eastern Modernism and the Form of the Present, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, sets up a comparative framework examining the emergence of modernist literary styles in Arabic and Hebrew literatures, and explores the political valences of literary representations of stasis: time that stops moving or characters caught in suspension. She is currently developing a project on how cultural and literary representations of the future are shaped by neoliberal logics of security and management in the Middle East, which examines, among other objects, petrofictions in art projects from the Arabian Peninsula, futuristic fiction from Palestine and Lebanon, and cultural diplomacy from Israel.
Educational Background
- Ph.D: Comparative Literature, UCLA, 2017
- B.A.: Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 2010
Specialties
- Modern Arabic Language and Literature
- Literary theory
- Modern Hebrew Literature
- Postcolonial Theory and Criticism;
- Gender and Feminism