Mona Kareem (she/they) is an assistant professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests focus on literary cultures of race and ethnicity in the Global South, with an emphasis on Afro-Asian encounters in the Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf region. Her scholarship is comparative and interdisciplinary, crossing the bounds of Arab, South Asian, and African studies. Her articles have appeared in Arabian Humanities, Jadaliyya, Arab Studies Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, among other publications.
Prior to joining Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Kareem was a visiting scholar at the Center for Humanities at Tufts University, the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, the Arabic program at the University of Maryland College Park, and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship at Bard College, the Arab American National Museum, Poetry International, and Banff Center. She is an editor at The Massachusetts Review and a member of the West Asian forum executive committee of the Modern Languages Association. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections, and the translator of Octavia Butler, Ashraf Fayadh, Ra’ad Abdulqadir, among others. Her poetry appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others.