Mazen Naous

Professor

Mazen Naous has a BFA from The Boston Conservatory, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before coming to UMass, he taught at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, the College of Wooster, and the University of Balamand (Lebanon). His teaching and research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, Arab American literature, music and literature, classical and modernist Arabic literature, and translation theory. He has published on Arab American fiction, 19th and 20th-century comparative Anglo-Arab poetry, and postcolonial fiction.

He is currently writing a book provisionally titled The Music of Arab American Fiction. Naous is the translator of Memoirs of Juliette Elmir Sa’adeh: Syrian Social Nationalist, Reformer, Political Prisoner (2022), the author of a monograph titled Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel (2020) and editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays titled Identity and Conflict in the Middle East and its Diasporic Cultures (2016).

 

Research Areas

• 20th Century and Contemporary Literature
• Colonial, Postcolonial, & Transnational
• American Literature
• Theory and Culture

Courses Recently Taught

• Engl 491LM: Literature, Music, and the Rules of Engagement
• Engl 362AA: Contemporary Arab American Fiction
• Engl 362: Of Immigrants and Migration
• Engl 491AS: The Arabian Nights in World Literature