Senior Fellow in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"
June–July 2025

Arab Writers' Literary Records: Archives and Questions (1850 to the Present)

This project pursues an ambitious approach to investigating literary records in and from the Arab world (1850 to the present): The papers (Arabic: اوراق, awraq) writers leave behind, ranging from their personal libraries to private papers. In the absence of institutionalised literature archives in the Arab world, questions arise about the sources of philological and literary research in this field, their preservation and accessibility. Many literary records have been lost, some have been destroyed or looted in times of political crisis and war, some are dispersed in deposits across the world. This project aims to (1) build a collaborative online compendium, the Compendium awraq, an innovative open-access repository and web-based tool for interdisciplinary research, to map what remains. (2) Document writers at work to gain insights into their lives and the creative processes and ways of production they are enmeshed in – through transregional and multilingual exchanges – and (3) forge new paths in the study of modern Arabic literature as part of world literature. These objectives build on each other. They are interrelated and to be pursued across disciplines by connecting literary studies to area studies, archival studies and the social sciences. The project’s outcomes will be shared in the form of a (travelling) literature exhibition and catalogue curated in collaboration with literature archives and museums in the Arab world and elsewhere. This dissemination to the public will be rooted in the project’s academic publications; in addition, the Compendium awraq will provide a showcase for the international literary community.

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature in the Department of English and an associated faculty in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. She is the recipient of the 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar Lüst Research Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange and the 2008 Annemarie Schimmel Research Award. In 2017/18, she was an invited resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study / Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2005, and her MA from the Free University of Berlin in 2000. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature and intersects with cultural and intellectual histories. Her most recent book is An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia University Press, 2024).