Rate My Professor Amal Amireh

Dr. Amal Amireh is an Associate Professor of English and World Literature in the Literature faculty at George Mason University. Her academic background includes a BA in English literature from Birzeit University in the West Bank, an MA, and a PhD in English and American literature from Boston University. Before joining George Mason University, she taught at An-Najah National University and Birzeit University, both in the West Bank/Palestine. Amireh's research specializations encompass Middle Eastern literature, world literature, postcolonial studies, gender, and sexuality, with a particular focus on Palestinian literature and culture, as well as Arab women writers.

Amireh has made significant contributions through her publications. She authored The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Garland, 2000). She co-edited, with Lisa Suhair Majaj, Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland, 2000) and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland, 2002). Her articles have appeared in leading journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, and GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. Key works include “Framing Nawal El-Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World” (Signs, 2000), “Between Complicity and Subversion: Body Politics in Palestinian National Narrative” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2003, reprinted in Diversifying the Discourse, 2006), “‘They are not like your daughters or mine’: Spectacles of Bad Women from the Arab Spring” (Bad Girls of the Arab World, University of Texas Press, 2017), and “Of Heroes and Men: the Crisis of Masculinity in the Post-Oslo Palestinian Narrative” (Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa, University of Cairo Press, 2021). Amireh has presented at conferences such as the Middle East Studies Association and institutions including Georgetown University and Virginia Tech University. She has featured in media like PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers (2002) and supervised dissertations, such as Adila Hanieh’s Rearticulating the Aesthetic and the Nationalist (2015). Her courses cover postcolonial literature, Arab women writers, gender and sexuality in Middle Eastern literature, and literature and human rights.