Dr Karima Laachir

Karima Laachir was trained as a cultural and literary critic. Her research area focuses on cultural studies in the Middle East and North Africa region or the intersection between culture and politics (cultural politics). She has worked extensively on diasporic cultural production with a particular focus on the Franco-Maghrebian community in France and their literary and cinematic production. She works on comparative literature (Arabophone, Francophone and Anglophone) and she is interested in a multilingual approach to postcolonial studies.

Karima has held visiting fellowships at EHESS in Paris (2007-8) and at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) at the Australian National University (2011-12).

Currently she is working on connected multi-lingual literary histories of modern and contemporary Arabic literature with a particular focus on the Maghreb region; she is the Maghreb Lead of the ERC funded project “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: For a New Approach to World Literature”.  As part of this project, she is preparing a Monograph on Postcolonial Moroccan Novel in Arabic and French: A Reading Together (contracted with Edinburgh University Press).  Karima's research interests include Cultural studies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Arabic popular culture, Maghrebi literature and culture, Comparative Literature (Arabophone, Francophone and Anglophone); Arab diaspora and cultural politics. She welcomes potential PhD students in any of these subjects.

PhD Supervision completed so far

• Bruno Levasseur (2009) Essai de lecture démocratique des représentations culturelles et politiques des grands ensembles français": une «archive» de la Cité des Quatre-Mille à La Courneuve (1962-2002).
• Chloe Gill-Khan (2012) Postcolonial European governance in question: a comparative case of British and French diasporic literary expressions.
• Cristina Moreno Almeida (2015) Critical reflections on rap music in contemporary Morocco: urban youth culture between and beyond state's co-optation and dissent.
• Natalie Abou Shakra (2015) Popular Dissident Music in the Context of Authoritarianism in Modern and Contemporary Egypt: A Case Study of the Nubian Egyptian Artist Mohammad Munir.
• Nathaneal Mannone (2016) Managing Dissent: Censorship, Patronage, and 'Breathing Space' in Contemporary Tunisian Cultural Production.
• Irene Fernandez Ramos (2017) Performing immobility: the individual-collective body and the representation of confined subjectivities in contemporary Palestinian theatre.
• Cleo Geraldine Jay (2017) Performing change? Contemporary performance practices in Morocco.
• Sefik Huseyin (2018) The Spatial Experience of the Nation in Post-1980s Turkish Fiction: Between Modernity & Neo-Ottomanism

Cultural studies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Arabic popular culture, Maghrebi literature and culture, Comparative Literature (Arabophone, Francophone and Anglophone); Arab diaspora and cultural politics.