PhD student research interests
Yousef Awad
BA in English Language & Literature, University of Jordan 1994.
MA in English Language & Literature, University of Jordan 2004.
Currently, PhD student at English and American Studies, University of Manchester
My research is mainly concerned with examining the works of Arab-American and Arab-British women writers. In particular, I study Ahdaf Soueif, Leila Aboulela, Fadia Faqir, Laila Halaby and Diana Abu-Jaber among other Arab women writers in diaspora. I contend that these novelists, who use English as their writing language, adopt a feminist stand that does not only target Arab audience but also includes, or more specifically adequately addresses, an international readership. The works I have selected were written between 1999 and 2007 and some of them, Soueif's The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1999. In my research I attempt to explore the relationship between these texts and the current debate on hybridity, transnational feminism, resistance, intertextuality and cosmopolitanism. In addition, I am interested in investigating the ways in which these writers try to re-write and to interpolate the Western canon. At one point in my thesis, I read some of these texts as an attempt to correct some of the misconceptions about Arab women, Islam and Arab culture in general. Naturally, my project engages with the works of Homi Bhabha, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bill Aschroft among other exponents of the feminist/postcolonialist theory. The last part of my research will be dedicated to studying the influence of 9/11 on the works of Arab women writers and will try to delineate the differences and similarities between these works.