Amanda Batarseh

Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Pronouns: she/her/هي

Languages: Arabic, Italian, English

Affiliated Faculty: Middle East Studies, Ethnic Studies, Black Diaspora and African American Studies, Italian Studies, Study of Religion

Articles & Book Chapters

• “Centering Place in Tawfiq Canaan’s Literary Cartography,” Journal of Palestine Studies 52.3 (2023) LINK
• “Love, Countryside and the Fellah: Tawfiq Canaan’s Romantic Translation,” Studies in Romanticism: Palestine Romanticism’s Contemporary 62.2 (2023) LINK
• “Raja Shehadeh’s ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.2 (2021) LINK
• “Freedom to Imagine” Reflections on the First Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” Jerusalem Quarterly 87 (2021) LINK
• “Reading Indigenous Grammars of Place and Narrative Transit in Bethlehem’s Mary,” in Bethlehem: A Socio-Cultural History, ed. Mitri Raheb (2020)
• “Re/writing the Orient: Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the Thousand and One Nights and the Hundred and One Nights,” California Italian Studies Journal 9.1 (2019) LINK

Translations

• “The Literature of Resistance after al-Kārithah (the Catastrophe)” by Ghassan Kanafani in Alchemy: A Journal of Translation (2024) LINK

Public Humanities Work

• “Commemorating 75 Years of Nakba: The Spectral Conversations of Mourid Barghouti and Radwa Ashour” Spectre Journal (2023) LINK

• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis, 2018
• M.B.A., University of Buckingham, 2009
• B.A. in Art History and Italian Studies, Scripps College, 2005