Bio: Dr. Yasmine Khayyat is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the Department
of African Middle Eastern, South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University. Her
research interests include contemporary Arabic literature, cultural memory studies and comparative
literature. She holds a Ph.D. in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Columbia University’s
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Institute for
Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS). She received her B.A. in English Literature from the American
University of Beirut (AUB) and her M.A. in Comparative Literature from the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS). She is currently working on her forthcoming book War Remains: Southern
Counterpublics, Literature and Memory in Contemporary Lebanon, which explores the intersection of
classical Arabic poetic lamentations over ruins and their manifestations in contemporary Lebanese
literary and cultural productions. It traces the figuration of the ruin as a site of rupture and potentiality
embodied in modern Arabic fiction and sites of memory connected to the Lebanese civil war (19751990) and the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon (1978-2000).