Anne Marie McManus

Join us on Thursday, November 11th at 12:30pm for a lecture with scholar Anne Marie McManus on Syrian Prision Writing, hosted as part of the Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education event series.

Anne Marie McManus is a literary scholar who was awarded a PhD in Comparitive Literature from Yale University. Her work focuses on topics in comparative literature in the English, French, and Arabic languages and she currently oversees the ERC-funded project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

From the Forum Transregionale Studien:
The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
Bridging the disciplines of literary studies and cultural anthropology, SYRASP researches contemporary narratives, images, social media practices, and cultural practices related to incarceration and forced disappearance in Syria under the Assad regime (1970-present). SYRASP builds on the extensive literary canon of Syrian prison narratives and their associated scholarship to reflect, in open collaboration with prison writers and intellectuals, on the artistic, cultural, and political valences of creating prison narratives today. Examples of research questions include: what forms of community, or publics, are presumed and invited by contemporary Syrian prison narratives? And how do today’s practitioners seek to re-write, re-fashion, and perhaps break from the established genres, authors, and meanings of prison literature? SYRASP’s core methods incorporate dialogue with stakeholders in the Syrian cultural field and reflexivity on the position of academic research produced on Syrian literature and culture in English. Key publications from the grant will therefore include traditional academic genres (e.g., single-author articles and monographs) as well as interviews, dialogues, and reflections on the ethics of literary studies.