Dr Zalfa Feghali

I am a specialist in US and Canadian literature and culture with expertise in border studies, citizenship studies, and vulnerability studies. I joined the School of Arts and Centre for American Studies in January 2016.

From January 2022 to December 2023 I am working on my AHRC project "Vulnerability: A Research Method for Literary and Cultural Studies."

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.
• I am a AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellow and PI on a project titled "Vulnerability: A Research Method for Literary and Cultural Studies", which runs from January 2022 for two years. Among other activities, this project will support me as I write my second monograph, Fictions of Vulnerability: Vulnerable Reading across North American Borders, examining US, Canadian, and Mexican cultural responses to intersecting and ongoing hemispheric, cross-border crises of raced and gendered vulnerability.
• I am co-editor (with my colleague Dr Deborah Toner, Leicester) of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (under contract, 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 Professor Gillian Roberts, Nottingham), of the Borders Talk podcast.
• I am a member of the British Academy-funded project "Emancipatory Research Methods: Vulnerability in Practice" (PI Katharine Low, King's College London and Alex Halligey, Johannesberg Institute for Advanced Study).

Monographs

Feghali, Z. Fictions of Vulnerability: Vulnerable Reading 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, spatial organisation in protest camps, literary legacies of La Malinche and gender-based violence in Mexico, contemporary Turkish women's writing (English), and British Latinx Studies. 

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 and/or narratives of risk and resilience.

I have contributed to all years of the English degree, including, at Year 1, EN1070 Writing Matters, EN1002 Classic US Texts, and EN1005 Modern American Writing; at Year 2, EN2013 Diversity in American Literature and my option module, EN2011 American Literary Figures; 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