#IAS_NUQ Global Postdoctoral Scholar Colloquium
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar +974 4454 5100
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Spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nahda was a period of prolific intellectual activity and institutional restructuring prompted by new economic flows and developments in the Arabic printing press. The phenomenon has typically been viewed through the region's circuits of exchange with Europe as well as culturally adjacent spheres. Looking instead at large-scale migration to the Americas, and particularly to the Caribbean, this talk explores new coordinates of the Nahda by taking the literary works of two Arab migrants publishing on opposite ends of the island of Hispaniola as a case study. It argues that Nahdawi discourses not only moved with their migrant agents but were also transformed as they encountered histories of Indigenous erasure and unparalleled reliance on African enslavement, urbanization built on industrialized sugar and tobacco, and the United States' expanding practice of political occupation.
Angela Haddad is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). Her research works across Arabic, Spanish, and French traditions and examines the ethno-racial and social imaginaries that emerged outside direct colonial rule but across and within disparate empires, nationalisms, and transregional encounters. She received her PhD from New York University in the field of Comparative Literature in August 2025.
Her dissertation “Arab Print Culture and the Mahjar in the Caribbean, 1900–1940” traces the literary and political connections between the Arab eastern Mediterranean and Caribbean, particularly through the writings of Arab migrants in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Her essay, “Chronicling ‘the Death of the Arab’ in Colombian Literature,” appears in Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America . She is also a literary translator from Arabic into English.
At #IAS_NUQ, Haddad will develop her dissertation into a monograph on Arab Caribbean textual production, incorporating fragile and previously inaccessible materials through a restoration and digitization initiative. She will also begin a new project on Arab travel writing and its role in shaping early South–South intellectual and aesthetic exchanges.
DATE
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
TIME
12:15 – 1:15 p.m.
LOCATION
1-300
Northwestern Qatar