Hanan Natour (EXC 2020)

Hanan Natour is a postdoctoral researcher of Arabic and Comparative Literature at EXC 2020 and an associated fellow of the programme Europe in the Middle East — The Middle East in Europe (EUME). Her current research focuses on modern Arabic literature from the Maghreb and on literary networks between North Africa, the Levant and Europe. Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming (2026). During her PhD, she served as research associate to the ERC-funded project PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present, where she collected and analysed data on the literary links between Palestine, Tunis, Paris and London, and developed visualisations for the project's open access data platform. In her input, Natour will draw on this work to investigate reading as a practice of survival, a way of preserving collective memory in a literary locale that is threatened to disappear and has been challenged with fragmentation, dispersal and exile for many decades.