Rate My Professor Hanan Al Alawi

Dr. Al-Alawi conducts interdisciplinary research on bodies and power in modern Arabic, Persian, and diasporic Anglophone literature. Her work centers on how embodied knowledges produced by historically marginalized communities—women, queer, stateless, and Indigenous peoples—in the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) reimagine discourses of social justice, belonging, subjectivity, and national literary canons. A peer-reviewed article, “A Spectral Archive: Mona Kareem’s Feminist Imaginary in Ināth al-Ashbāḥ (Femme Ghosts),” appeared in Feminist Formations (Volume 35, Issue 3, 2023). She teaches GWS 101: Gender, Women, and Cultural Representation, GWS 345: Narrating Queer Lives, and courses addressing queer and feminist theory and movements, disability in women’s Arab/ic literature, and cultural representations of gender worldwide. Multilingual in Kuwaiti dialect, Modern Standard Arabic, Persian, and English, Dr. Al-Alawi emphasizes ethical engagement with silenced stories that witness injustice and fabulate alternative human and beyond-human experiences. Her scholarly approach integrates aesthetics and politics to dismantle oppressive structures via education, grassroots organizing, arts, and literature, aligning with the Wisconsin Idea.