Hanan Al Alawi

Hanan Al-Alawi is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began her appointment in Fall 2024. Originally from Kuwait, she earned a BA in English and an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from Kuwait University. In 2024, she received a dual-title PhD in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Pennsylvania State University. Her doctoral project, “The Body's Memory: Visceral Poetics in Contemporary Arabic and Persian Literature in the Gulf,” underscores her commitment to humanities-based inquiry into marginalized literatures.

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.

Professional Email: halalawi@wisc.edu