I am currently a lecturer in Arabic and Translation Studies.  I am Head of Arabic area and a Specialist for the Translation Studies (Arabic-English-Arabic).   My research area is Language and Power in the MENA region and how they manifest in various discourses (particularly gender discourses).  My research interests extend to the areas of Translation, Memory and Narrativity.   I also have research interest into Francophone Postcolonial literature and culture.

Prior to coming to Birmingham, I held an ESRC Fellowship for 3 years  at the University of Durham, Department of Modern Languages (Arabic section), working on a research project entitled Globalisation and its impact on Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic and dialects.  It was an interdisciplinary project analysing the linguistic changes that happened to Arabic as a result of the ‘Internet Revolution’ using an Internet based corpus, developing into deeper analyses of the cyberspace and the relationship between language and the various discourses that emerged prior, during and post Arab Revolutions.

For my PhD, I studied at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Prof. Dionisius Agius, working on the ‘Strategies EFL learners use to decode and encode idioms with particular reference to the bilingual Dictionaries, Arabic-English-Arabic.

As for my Masters degree, I studied at the University of Leeds, School of Education in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).  My dissertation was on ‘Traditional Qur’anic Schools: An Anthropological Study’, in which I analyse Qur’anic schools in Algeria as language large classes.  I studied the Qur’anic schools in terms of large class management and teaching techniques.

At the University of Constantine (Algeria), I studied for 4 years for a BA in English.  My BA ‘memoire’ was on ‘Victorian Women Writers’.

My current research is on ‘Sexual violence against women in Algeria: narratives, translations, languages'.  The project firstly aims to contribute to the study complex intersection between language, translation studies and literature related to violence in contemporary Algeria. The project’s output will be a monograph, bridging the gap of knowledge between literature in Arabic and in French, highlighting the role of translation in understanding discourses.  Secondly, it investigates why colonial violence against Algerian women in the Liberation War is relatively well researched compared with terrorist violence committed in the 1990s, which remains understudied.  The monograph investigates narratives of lived trauma translated through various mediums (novels, testimonies, memoirs and personal interviews of survivors) and through languages (French, Arabic) and in translations. Sexual violence in wartime (Community on Facebook)

My first publication on the theme of sexual violence in Algeria in the 1990s will appear in a Special Issue I am an editing for Boundary 2, Duke University Press.

I organised an international conference on the theme of sexual violence at wartime in the MENA region at the University of Birmingham.

The project builds on my research on language and power and their relations to gender discourses in the MENA region in general. It investigates the relationship between language, literature, translation and cultural memory on sexual violence against women in conflict in Algeria and how this violence is translated through various mediums (novels, testimonies, memoirs and interviews of survivors), across languages (French, Arabic) and in translations.  I organised an international conference at the University of Birmingham in 2014 on the theme of ‘Narrating and Translating Sexual Violence at wartime in the MENA region’.

My research on language and power was on the emergence of new variety of Arabic which I call e-Arabic as a result of globalisation.  After exhausting the topic, I became particularly interested in a new genre of writing that is emerging out of blogs, emails…etc.; making its way into Arabic literature despite the controversy it is creating.  An example of these ‘novels’ are Banat Al Riyadh (2005) and Ayza Atjawiz (2008). (For more information see my blog: http://earaby.blogspot.co.uk/).  I organised International Conferences on the theme for example one at the University of Durham: “Cyber space and minorities/oppositional voices in the Arab world”. I collaboratively with Professor Abdeljalikl Temimi organized an International conference in Tunisia (Foundation Temimi, Tunis, Tunisia) on “The Internet and the Arabic Language”. I published extensively on the concept of e-Arabic and gave papers at various conferences and symposia.

My first monograph is published with Peter Lang, entitled Cultural and Linguistic Encounters: Arab EFL Learners Encoding and Decoding Idioms, in which I study idioms and their translations into English by Arab EFL learners, with a particular reference to bilingual dictionaries (Arabic-English-Arabic).