Dr Zalfa Feghali

My work is primarily focused on North American literature and culture, though I consider myself an interdisciplinary border studies academic. I joined the School of Arts, Media and Culture in 2016. 

I am engaged in a number of interdisciplinary research projects in studies of borders, gender, and vulnerability:

• I co-convene (with Dr Caleb Bailey) the Vulnerability Studies Network, currently on hiatus.
• I was a AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellow and PI on a project titled "Vulnerability: A Research Method for Literary and Cultural Studies", which ran from January 2022 to December 2023. This project will have a long and rich afterlife: among other activities, I have been writing my second monograph Open Wounds: Reading Fictions of Vulnerability Across North American Borders, about what it means to read what I call fictions of vulnerability, texts that are about vulnerability but which also expose the fictions of vulnerability. 
• I am co-editor (with my miraculous colleague Dr Deborah Toner, Leicester) of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (2024), bringing together essays in history, literature, cultural studies, international politics, geography, media studies, development studies, sociology, and visual arts.
• I am co-host (with the far more articulate Professor Gillian Roberts, Nottingham), of the academic podcast Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell, which informally explores border depictions and encounters in our contemporary world.
• I have been involved in a number of British Academy-funded projects since 2021, including as PI a first iteration of the Vulnerability Studies Network; and as a team member on "Researching the Felt and Lived Experiences of In/Security" (PI Katharine Low, KCL) and "Emancipatory Research Methods: Vulnerability in Practice" (PI Katharine Low, King's College London and Alex Halligey, Johannesberg Institute for Advanced Study).

Monographs

Feghali, Z. Open Wounds: Fictions of Vulnerability Across North American Borders (in progress)

Feghali, Z. 2019. Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice in Contemporary American and Canadian Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Essays

Ashby, D., Banerjea, N., Baker, P., Borisa D., Browne K., Di Feliciantonio, C., Feghali, Z., Kerrigan, D., McAuliffe, M., Neary, A., Rosenberg, R., Brown, G. 2022. ‘Sexual and intimate citizenship in a Time of Pandemic.’ Leicester Institute for Advanced Study Working Papers Series 7. https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/lias/article/view/4079/3486

Ashby, D., Banerjea, N., Baker, P., Borisa D., Browne K., Di Feliciantonio, C., Feghali, Z., Kerrigan, D., McAuliffe, M., Neary, A., Rosenberg, R., Brown, G. 2022. ‘The Epistemologies of “Lockdown”: closets, vulnerability, and citizenship.’ Leicester Institute for Advanced Study Working Papers Series 7. https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/lias/article/view/4078/3485

Feghali, Z. 2018. ‘“We have to get along with others”: Cosmopolitanism and Cross-Border Literary History.’ In Roberts, Gillian, ed. Reading between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49^th Parallel. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 290-310.

Feghali, Z. 2013. ‘Conversations that never happened: Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Campbell, and Howard Adams.’ In Roberts, Gillian and David F. Stirrup, eds. Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 335-55. 

Feghali, Z. 2013. ‘Hemispheric Studies and Indigenous Peoples: Considering a New Approach.’ In Conway, Kyle and Timothy Pasch, eds. Beyond the Border: Tensions Across the 49^th Parallel. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 153-169. 

Feghali, Z. 2011. Thinking Through the New Mestiza.’ Journal of International Women's Studies. 12:2. 61-74. 

Edited Collections

Feghali, Z and Toner, D. Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. London: Routledge, 2024. (contracted, in progress)

I have supervised interdisciplinary doctoral projects on Australian drama, Caribbean women's writing, and contemporary women's writing and psychopathy.

I am currently supervising projects on ecocriticism and climate fiction, literary legacies of La Malinche and gender-based violence in Mexico, contemporary Turkish women's writing, and British Latinx Studies, as well as projects in human geography on spatiality in protest camps; in translation studies on narratological approaches to English translations of Chinese fiction; and in creative writing on memoir writing and the care system.

I would be interested in supervising PhD projects on the following broad topics:

• Contemporary North American literature and culture
• Border studies and cross-border literature and culture (for example USA, Canada, Mexico)
• Literary and cultural representations of borders, citizenship, and belonging in the North American context
• Vulnerability studies linked to any of the above.

I teach across all years of the English degree, including, at Year 1, EN1070 Writing Matters, EN1002 Classic US Texts, EN1005 Modern American Writing, and EN1090 Literature for Children and Young Adults; at Year 2, EN2013 Diversity in American Literature and my employability module, EN2290 Your Career and Other Stories; at Year 3, EN3010 Dissertation, EN3060 Science Fiction: Adventures in Space and Time; and my option module EN3021 Literatures of Protest. 
I also contribute to the MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, offering sessions on EN7001 Research Methods; EN7031/7032 Modern Literature and Theory 1/2;  EN7252 Twenty-First Century Fiction; including my own specialist option module, EN7922 North American Indigenous Literatures. I also supervise MA dissertations.

I am happy to be contacted in relation to

• contemporary US/Canadian literature and culture
• vulnerability and vulnerability policy/assessments
• the US-Mexico border
• unaccompanied refugee children and asylum seekers
• femicide/gender-based violence