2017 Workshop

Emily Drumsta

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University

Emily Drumsta is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She specializes in modern Arabic and Francophone literatures, with particular focus on form and disillusionment in the Arabic novel, the politics of meter in modernist Arabic poetics, and negotiations of language and identity in North African literature and culture. Her current book project explores how late twentieth-century authors in Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon use the trope of investigation to interrogate the notion of “resistance literature” and decouple the figure of the author from authority and authoritativeness. She is also working on a translation of selected work by the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Mala’ika. She is a co-founder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB from Brown University.