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).

Research Project at EXC Temporal Communities:

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