Litvin to Research in Sweden
Margaret Litvin, Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Center (MENA), has been awarded a prestigious fellowship that will allow her to work and research for a year in Sweden.
The news was broken in a March 26 BU Today article entitled “Two CAS Scholars Win Respected Fellowships.”
From the text of the article:
“[Litvin] will spend the 2015–2016 academic year at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, courtesy of a $75,000 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The ACLS also awarded the same fellowship to Brooke Blower, a CAS associate professor of history, who will spend the next academic year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, researching World War II and the millions of American non-soldiers on six continents who participated in some way.”
MENA is an affiliated regional center with the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Again, from the article:
“This award will support my research, but I expect it to feed back into my teaching and program design work as well,” [said Litvin.] “The way we do regional studies is changing, and needs to change more, to recognize unexpected connections between different parts of the world. Just because Russia and the Arab world might be studied under different centers or programs doesn’t mean students shouldn’t look at both and think about how they’re related.”
Margaret Litvin writes about modern Arabic drama and political culture. Her book, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011), examines the many reworkings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in postcolonial Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Her current book project (working title Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams: Forgotten Flows of Twentieth-Century Culture) explores the educational and cultural ties between the Soviet Union and several Arab countries during and since the Cold War, tracing their effects on Arabic literature and theatre. Read more about her here.