The talk will reorientate engagement with Arab displacements towards important contemporary Iraqi, Palestinian and Syrian literary works’ myriad intermedial and transmedial expressions of dislocation, disembodiment, dismemberment and disquiet.

They broaden, complicate and redefine the significance of displacement on physical, affective, aesthetic, and historical levels while rethinking the possibilities of a hauntology that can trigger empathy.

Rita Sakr is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University. Rita’s public engagement and publications cross disciplines, especially in relation to modern Arab(ic) literature and literary and filmic representations of forced displacement in the contexts of (post)conflict studies, more-than-human rights and decoloniality. She is the outgoing co-chair of the Sanctuary programme at MU and a member of the board of Literature Ireland and of the judging committee of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Read more here.