Convener of Arabic and Russian, Associate Professor of Arabic & Comparative Literature
Fall 2024 Office Hours: Mondays 3:00-5:00 on Zoom, Tuesdays 12:00-2:00 in person, and by appointment
Margaret Litvin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature. She teaches courses including “War in Arabic Literature & Film,” “Global Shakespeares,” “1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination,” “Arabic Translation & Interpreting,” and the bilingual course “Intro to Arabic Literature.” She also teaches in the Core social science sequence and in the MFA in Literary Translation program. She founded BU’s interdisciplinary major in Middle East and North Africa Studies in 2014 and has advised the Arabic minor since 2009. She welcomes prospective student inquiries about the BU MFA in Literary Translation, the Arabic minor, and potential undergraduate research projects in Arabic.
Litvin’s research aims to help reinscribe modern Arabic cultural production into its proper global context. She has written about Arabic rewritings of Shakespeare (the 2011 book Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost and related articles); about Arab/ic theatre for global audiences; and more recently about the literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet ties. She has co-edited the primary source anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History with historians Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova (Oxford, 2023), co-translated the memoir of early Soviet-educated Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi (under review), and published on the Cold War struggle over Tolstoy and on the “intimate foreign relations” of Soviet student dormitories. Her book manuscript Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance, which explores the lifeworlds of Arab students in the USSR and the Russian Girlfriend Fantasy in contemporary Arabic fiction, is under review. Her current project, a translation of the 2019 novel al-Hayy al-Rusi (The Russian Quarter) by exiled Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez, is supported by a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and by the BU Center on Forced Displacement.
Read Professor Litvin’s essay about teaching Literary Translation at Boston University
Watch Professor Litvin’s lecture “Shall We Be or Not Be: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Anxieties of Arab Nationalism.”
Visit Professor Litvin’s Personal Website
Discussion with director Hani Afifi at Cairo University, 2011
Interview with BBC Arabic on Arabic Chekhov adaptations, 2022