My teaching centers on creating student-focused, collaborative learning environments where students develop cultural literacy alongside critical thinking, communication, and leadership skills. I approach literary studies as a method for cultivating an ethics of care—one that encourages students to reflect on how cultural practices and social issues shape, and are shaped by, their lived experiences.
Across my courses, I design learning experiences that help students develop a historically and ethically informed understanding of their own positionality as interpreters and producers of culture. I encourage active inquiry, creativity, and critical reflection, fostering classrooms where students feel responsible for their own learning and empowered to contribute to collective knowledge-making.
My pedagogy is experiential and collaborative. In world-literature and speculative-fiction courses, I invite students to engage in worldbuilding projects or ecological fieldwork that links theoretical readings to embodied experience. These assignments—whether designing a fictional political system, examining an aspect of the local urban ecosystem, or producing creative multimodal work—teach students to see storytelling as a powerful mode of knowledge production that shapes how we imagine and inhabit the world.
I adopt a culturally responsive, comparative approach that centers multiple geographies, languages, and aesthetic traditions. My syllabi regularly incorporate underrepresented voices, particularly from Southwest Asia and North Africa and from communities disproportionately affected by climate change and histories of colonialism. Intersectionality is a key analytical method across my teaching, helping students examine how categories such as race, gender, class, and environment structure narrative, power, and experience.
I teach across modern and contemporary literature, comparative literature, science fiction and futurisms, environmental humanities, Southwest Asian and North African literatures, and literary and cultural theory. My courses often explore:
I combine brief lectures with student presentations, close-reading workshops, group discussions, and scaffolded writing tasks to support students’ analytical and creative development.
Literary Studies
Tutoring and Supervision
More information on my Utrecht University webpage
Comparative Literature
English
Arabic
Online Courses