Humanities scholars have the ability and responsibility to bridge clashing worldviews – 5in10 with Hanan Natour

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, where she contributes to the UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus”. Hanan obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction at Freie Universität Berlin, co-supervised at the University of Oxford (2024). Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. During her PhD, she served as a Research Associate to the ERC-funded project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb and Mashreq. Hanan holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford, 2018) and a BA in Arabic and German Literature (University of Göttingen, 2016), and spent an academic year at Paris-Sorbonne University. In the academic years 2025–27, Hanan is an affiliated EUME Fellow.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?

I study modern Arabic literature – its function in processes of social transformation and its aesthetics. I am specifically interested in how literature takes part in political turning points and how it shapes worldviews that are embedded in historical narratives. One of the core premises of this research is that literature does not only describe the world – it provides spaces for alternative histories, for critical reflection, and interaction. My focus over the last few years has been Tunisian literature, a fascinating literary heritage that engages with moments of upheaval and protest throughout its history. My PhD thesis explores narratives of liberation, emancipation and decoloniality in Tunisian Arabic novels published since 1987, the year when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali took to power.

It studies contemporary literature with an awareness of its own literary history, rather than forcing Western theories of the novel onto the modern Arabic novel. This approach helped me to avoid exploiting Arabic literary texts exclusively for direct sociological analyses, as it so often is the case. I think that we should study both the themes and the forms of these texts, and be aware of our own positionality when doing so. How do narratives of liberation during the anti-colonial fight, during the Bread Riots of the 1980s and during the Tunisian Uprisings of 2011 relate to each other? What can we learn from the practices with which authors today relate to, and inscribe themselves, into local literary histories?

Many texts creatively subvert both the colonial predicament and censorship which still shape people´s lives today. The Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi is a fascinating example of a writer whose legacy lasts to this day. His famous verses travelled from their original context – the anti-colonial movement against the French occupation – to the Tunisian Uprisings of 2011:

إِذا الشَّعْبُ يومًا أرادَ الحياةَ
فَلا بُدَّ أنْ يَسْتَجِيبَ القدرْ
ولا بُدَّ للَّيْلِ أنْ يَنْجَلِي
ولا بُدَّ للقيدِ أنْ يَنْكَسِرْ

If one day a people desires to live,
Then fate will answer their call.
Their night will then begin to fade
And their chains break and fall.

Translated by Mohamed-Salah Omri in his article “A Revolution of Dignity and Poetry,” Boundary 2, 39. 1 (2012), 137–165, 137.

Not only were these verses adopted into the Tunisian national anthem in 1987, they also returned as slogans during the large-scale demonstrations which started in southern Tunisia and inspired protests across the region.

My second research interest has been devoted to Palestinian literature. Parallel to writing my PhD, I contributed to the ERC-funded Digital Humanities project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present”. This work meant a lot to me, as it allowed me to contribute to collecting, analysing and making accessible the networks of Palestinian writers and editors which are threatened of being erased. I conducted fieldwork and studied transnational literary networks between Palestine and the Maghreb. It was amazing to look into the movements of these writers and editors, many of whom came to Tunis after the siege of Beirut in 1982, and developed literary links with Paris and London, amongst other places. To get an idea of how these network analyses translate into interactive visualizations, you may visit this link.

As part of the UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus” at Queen Mary University of London I now continue my previous interest in transnational literature, historical narratives and digital research methods, looking more closely into literary encounters between Granada and Kairouan, and how they return in the present.

2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?

Born and raised in a German-Palestinian family I was fascinated by how language and literature have the power to bring together perspectives which seem to be clashing at first sight. At school, I wrote an essay on J. W. von Goethe´s West-Eastern Divan, a famous collection of poems which celebrates cultural encounters. I wanted to continue searching for these encounters, and discover the world of Arabic literature – one which I had grown up listening to in the form of Palestinian fairy tales, but had not had the chance of reading in a written format. This endeavour has become my continued journey. My studies in Göttingen, Paris, and Oxford then sparked my interest in the modern period, one which holds so many foundational turning points and is yet often underrepresented in the academic study of Arabic.

For my PhD, I chose to connect with the field of Comparative Literature at the interdisciplinary Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. I was driven by the wish to strengthen the understanding of Arabic as being part of Comparative Literature – a field which traditionally often limits itself to Romance languages. When dividing literature strictly into different departments, we not only manifest colonial hierarchies in academia; we also neglect the multiplicity of communal perspectives that are so crucial for social cohesion. My first Postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” allowed me to continue working towards more interdisciplinary forms of collaboration. Even now, a few months into my second Postdoc, I still feel very much like at the beginning. There is always another question to ask, another literary encounter to study. I am grateful to be able to continue working in this way, trying to build bridges between academic disciplines, languages, and people.

3. What were formative encounters or challenges?

In comparison with Arabic literature from Egypt and the Levant, literature from Tunisia and the Maghreb more generally has been studied less – despite the fact that it provided canonical figures like al-Shabbi and many others. This circumstance posed a challenge at the beginning. My approach was to spend several months in Tunis, speaking to scholars and authors and understanding their view on modern Tunisian literature. A second challenge was that it can be difficult to get hold of Arabic print copies and editions published a few years ago in bookshops and libraries. In the end, with the kind help of inspiring Tunisian literary personalities and professors, I returned with a suitcase full of books and built a small private library of Tunisian literature and research about it in Arabic and French. I add to it whenever I visit Tunisia, and still use it a lot when writing publications and supervising students.

The most formative encounter for me was through a project on Modern Tunisian Literatures which I founded with my mentor Professor Mohamed-Salah Omri across the Universities of FU Berlin and Oxford, and in collaboration with the University of Tunis. Together, we hosted workshops with the leading scholars in our field and worked closely with our Tunisian colleagues to produce the first English-language volume devoted to the varieties of modern Tunisian literature. I feel that this collaboration has established a network that will last beyond the publication of our book Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, 2026).

4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?

Humanities scholars have the ability and responsibility to bridge clashing worldviews. We can contribute facts and nuances to public controversies that tend to be increasingly reductive, exclusive, and even hostile. Academic freedom, critical thought, and debate for me are the essence of what the university stands for. All of these are severely under attack, which we see especially in the restrictions imposed on speaking about Palestine and the genocide. These limitations have been in place not only since 2023, on the contrary, they have shaped engagements with Palestinian realities across the academic and public spheres for decades. By asking the right questions and contributing to public debates, I think that scholars of the humanities can and should share their knowledge and help prevent discriminatory practices. We should solidarise with threatened scholars around the world, and stay connected with our colleagues who suffer from scholasticide. Within the academic sphere, I also feel the responsibility to work closely with my colleagues in the region to fight the colonial hierarchies whose repercussions are still palpable in the distribution of funding and access to publications.

5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?

I would recommend checking out the Open Access publication Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press) which hosts the visualisations created by the aforementioned PalREAD team led by Refqa Abu-Remaileh. It is a rich resource that includes timelines, maps, networks, and many other insights into the movements and fragmentations of Palestinian literature. It also includes a Podcast Series featuring important writers like Liana Badr and Elias Khoury. For less academic insights into Palestinian culture, I recommend the films of Elia Suleiman, and the poetry of Fadwa Tuqan.

As for Tunisia, I recommend reading the first Arabic novel by a Tunisian woman writer to be translated in its entirety into English, Amira Ghenim´s A Calamity of Noble Houses. Previously, only extracts of Arabic novels by Tunisian women writers had been translated. It is a historical novel which links the legacy of the reformer Tahar Haddad to women rights in Tunisia today, a topic which is central to modern Tunisian identities. In Arabic, I recommend the poetry of Munsif al-Wahaybi and Adam Fathi, as well as the novels of Mustafa al-Kilani and Rashida al-Sharni. If you rather wish to get insights into the varieties of Tunisian literature in Arabic, French, and the colloquial across multiple genres, you may wish to look out for the aforementioned volume Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies. 

For more on the recurrence of Al-Andalus as a trope, as a reference, and as a method in modern times, check out the new Podcast Series “Digital Al-Andalus – On the Record” hosted by the UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Ofand Through Al-Andalus” under the lead of Cristina Moreno Almeida at Queen Mary University of London.

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Citation: Humanities scholars have the ability and responsibility to bridge clashing worldviews – 5in10 with Hanan Natour, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 11.06.2026, https://trafo-hypotheses.org/65893

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