Expertise

Arabic Language, Modern Arabic Literature, Arab Cinema, Syrian Literature

• PhD, University of Pennsylvania
• MA, University of Texas at Austin

Biography

Professor Firat teaches Arabic, modern Arabic literature, Arab  cinema, and culture and dissent courses at Temple. She is the co-editor  of the volume Generations of Dissent in MENA Literary and Cinematic 
Productions, as well as working on her own book manuscript tentatively titled “The Historical Imaginary in Syrian Fiction.” Firat is a Fulbright Scholars (Jordan, 2013).

Additionally, Firat is a literary translator. Her translations can be found in The Book of Gaza; Beirut 39; Words without Borders; New Voices of Saudi Arabia, The Poetry. She is also the translator of Khalil  Sweileh’s award-winning novel Writing Love.

Selected Publications

Co-edited Volumes

• Syrian Literature: Continuities and Contiguities. Co-editor Daniel Behar. A special issue of Contemporary Levant vol 7. no. 1, Spring 2022. 
• Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production and the State in Middle East North Africa. Co-edited with R. Shareah Taleghani. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,2020.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

• “‘Tamer Hindi’, A Syrian Vendor of Humanism in Times of War” in “Humor, the Absurd, and the Abject in Middle Eastern and North African Cultural Production" a special issue of Comparative Literature and Culture (CLCWeb), 2022. 
• “Recalibrating the Historical Imaginary: Ḥaydar Ḥaydar’s Literary Collage” in “Syrian Literature: Continuities and Contiguities” a special issue of Contemporary Levant, vol 7. no 1, Spring 2022, pp. 54-65.
•  “Introduction to Syrian Literature: Continuities and Contiguities.” Co-authored with Daniel Behar. Contemporary Levant, vol 7. no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 1-4. 
•  "Re-formed Discourse: Papers/Awrāq of the (new) Syrian Writers’ Association (rābiṭah al-kuttāb al-surīyīn).” Alif, vol. 37, 2017, pp. 1-26.
• “Cultural Battles on the Literary Field: From the Syrian Writers Collective to the Last Days of Socialist Realism in Syria.” Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 18, no. 2, 2015, pp. 153-176.

Book Chapters

• “Editors’s Introduction.” Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production and the State in Middle East North Africa, edited by Alexa Firat and Shareah Taleghani, Syracuse University Press, 2020, pp. 1-11.
• “The Exilic Condition and Resistance in Jordanian Literature.”Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production and the State in Middle East North Africa, edited by Alexa Firat and Shareah Taleghani, Syracuse University Press, 2020, pp. 140-158.
• “The Symbolic Power of Syrian Collective Memory since 2011.” Culture and Crisis in the Arab World, edited by Richard Jaquemond and Felix Lang, I.B. Tauris, 2019, pp. 53-72.
• “Chapter 26: Syria.” The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Novelistic Traditions, edited by Waïl S. Hassan, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 436-454.

Courses Taught

• Arabic Elements, Intermediate, Advanced
• Arab Women Writers 
• Lens on Society: Arab Cinema 
• Modern Arabic Literature in Translation 
• Culture, Politics and the Art of Dissent in the MENA Uprisings 
• Gen Ed: World Society in Literature and Film