Dr Zalfa Feghali

I am an interdisciplinary border studies academic, working primarily in modern and contemporary literary and cultural studies and writing about different iterations of the relationship between the act of reading and the globally urgent themes of borders, migration, gender, vulnerability, and citizenship. Much of my teaching and and research is focused on the North American context.

I joined the University in 2016 and have been involved in range of roles including Admissions Tutor, EDI Lead, and Director of PGT. I am currently PGR Tutor in the School of Arts, Media and Communication and alongside this School-level role, I am one of Leicester’s two Site Directors for the AHRC Midlands4Cities DTP and its successor, the AHRC Doctoral Landscape Awards.

Since 2021 I have been engaged in a number of interdisciplinary research projects in studies of borders, gender, and vulnerability:

• I co-edited (with my talented friend Dr Caleb Bailey) a special issue of Comparative American Studies on "American Vulnerability: Narratives of Risk, Refusal, and Resistance". We brought together a range of fantastic scholars writing impressively about North American vulnerabilities.
• I am co-host (with the brilliant 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 co-edited (with the miraculous Dr Deborah Toner) The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (2024), bringing together essays in history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, international politics, geography, media studies, development studies, sociology, and visual arts.
• I was an 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 January 2024. This project will have a long and rich afterlife: among other activities, I have been writing my second monograph Open Wounds: Fictions of Vulnerability in the Americas, 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. In it I establish a ‘vulnerable reading’ paradigm in literary and cultural studies which I have adapted from my extensive research across criminology, disaster studies, economics, environmental and ecology studies, geography, legal studies, political studies, psychology, public health, resilience studies, security studies, social justice, social work, sociology, and sustainability studies, as well as medicine and allied health subjects. In the book I explore and connect ongoing gendered, racialized, and settler-colonial crises of vulnerability across and beyond Mexico, the United States, and Canada; as I offer new interpretations of major works by established and emerging U.S., Canadian, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous authors, filmmakers, and podcasters, I examine children's crisis narratives -- texts by or about unaccompanied children at the US-Mexico border; feminicide narratives (texts about the murders of women and girls across the United States, Canada, and Mexico); carceral school narratives (texts about residential schools and the entanglement of education and incarceration in the United States and Canada); and podcasts, which open up new ways of listening to these narratives.
• Between 2021 and 2024 I was involved in a number of British Academy-funded projects on vulnerability, 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, KCL and Alex Halligey, Johannesberg Institute for Advanced Study).

Looking beyond 2026:

• I will soon begin work on an edited collection, A Vulnerability Alphabet, which will take a more creative approach to vulnerability scholarship. The Alphabet brings together diverse essays across 26 chapters, each on a vulnerability “concept.” This creative-critical volume will showcase the work of scholars and writers from a range of disciplines and seeks to consolidate, question, and posit new vulnerability vocabularies.
• I am returning to my roots, exploring a project in contemporary Arab American diasporic writing.
• As part of my interest in the intersection of sound studies and citizenship, belonging, and hospitality, I'm working with colleagues in Media Studies on developing a project on Sonic Sitedness.
• Essays in development include two pieces engaging with the ethics of adaptation: the first is on Manuel Muñoz’s What You See In the Dark (2011), an incredible revisiting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the second explores Zitkala-Ša’s "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians” (1923) and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

Monographs, Edited Collections, and Special Issues

Feghali, Z. 2028. Open Wounds: Reading Fictions of Vulnerability Across American Borders. Forthcoming with University of Arizona Press, open access.

Bailey, C. and Feghali, Z. eds. 2025. ‘American Vulnerability’, Special Issue of Comparative American Studies, Volume 22, Issue 4. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ycas20/22/4

Feghali, Z. and Toner, D. eds. 2024. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. London: Routledge.

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

Essays

Feghali, Z. 2027. ‘Epilogue: Notes from a Disciplinary Outsider.’ In Derrider, M. and Dragani, A. Gender and Fieldwork in Unsettling Times: Navigating Ethnographic Dissonance (forthcoming, Routledge).

Bailey, C. and Feghali, Z. 2026. ‘Introduction: Risk, Refusal, and Resistance in Hemispheric Narratives of American Vulnerability.’ Comparative American Studies: Special Issue ‘American Vulnerability’, Volume 22, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2026.2634521 (free to access)

Feghali, Z. 2025. ‘Visualizing Vulnerability: the U.S.-Mexico Border asPalimpsest in Gregory Nava’s El Norte and Bordertown’, Comparative American Studies: Special Issue ‘American Vulnerability.’ https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2025.2568262 (open access)

Feghali, Z. 2024. ‘Podcasting and Resistance to Gender-based Violence Across Canada, the United States, and Mexico.’ In Feghali, Z. and Toner, D., eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. London: Routledge, pp. 232-244. https://hdl.handle.net/2381/27232401.v1 (open access)

Feghali, Z. and Toner, D. 2024. ‘Introduction: The Case for Globalizing Gender and Borderlands.’ In Feghali, Z. and Toner, D., eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. London: Routledge, pp. 3-13. https://hdl.handle.net/2381/27232419.v1 (open access)

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.

I have supervised interdisciplinary doctoral projects across literary studies, modern languages, creative writing, translation studies and human geography,  including on: Australian drama, Caribbean women's writing, contemporary women's writing and psychopathy, spatiality in protest camps, narratological approaches to English translations of Chinese fiction, climate fiction, contemporary legacies of La Malinche and gender-based violence in Mexico, contemporary Turkish women's writing, British Latinx Studies.

Current supervision includes: translating Liaozhai Zhiyi, memoir and the care system and eugenics in American drama. 

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

• Contemporary Arab American writing
• Border studies
• Cross-border literature and culture
• Literary and cultural representations of borders, citizenship, and belonging in the North American context
• Vulnerability, precarity, and risk
• Contemporary literature

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

My BA was in Political Studies (American University of Beirut, 2004). This was followed by an MA in English Literature (American University of Beirut, 2007) and a PhD in American and Canadian Studies (University of Nottingham, 2013).

I hold Fellowship of AdvanceHE and my PGR supervisory practice has been accredited against by the UK Council for Graduate Education's Good Supervisory Practice Framework.