Amina ElHalawani

After finishing her BA and MA in English Literature at Alexandria University, Amina ElHalawani pursued her PhD in Comparative Literature at l’Université de Perpignan via Domitia and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones. Her thesis focused on revolution and performativity in Anglo-Irish and Egyptian theatres in the second half of the twentieth century. During her doctoral work, ElHalawani spent research stays at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo and the University of Sydney. She is also a Fulbright FLTA Alumna, having taught for an academic year at Birmingham Southern College, USA.

ElHalawani currently holds a position as lecturer of English Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University. Her most recent publications include ‘Imaginaries of the North and South in Three Egyptian Plays’ in the volume Media and the Global South (2019) and ‘Beckett as Muse for Egyptian Playwrights’ in the journal Samuel Beckett Today-Aujourd’hui (2019).

Looking at the concept of ‘home’ beyond a simple location on the map, the project asks: What is home? And how does it shape and/or is shaped by individuals? Through studying the notion of ‘home’ in a variety of literary works — not only through the prism of territoriality and/or postcolonial studies, but through the prism of a theory of affect — this project seeks to provide an understanding of the concept of ‘home’ in different circumstances and cultures.

With a focus on a wide intercultural corpus of literary texts in English dating from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, descending from different literary traditions and multiple origins, and set in various geographical places, this projects explores the multi-faceted notion of ‘home’, which emerges beyond the often reductive view of it as a simple place of origin. It allows for variable individual and cultural perspectives and insights into what ‘home’ represents for different people, how it is both perceived and experienced, and how it resides most fully in that space in-between, in the interaction between the body and the space it inhabits/inhabited, often in the space of narrative.