Bio

Professor Karima Laachir is Director of the ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, a position she has held since January 2020. She was previously a tenured academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she also directed the SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, and before that Lecturer in Cultural Theory at the University of Birmingham, where she co-established a BA programme in Culture, Society and Communication and helped convene a seminar series on "Gender in Islamic Societies" for the UK Chevening Foreign Office Programme on "Islam and Governance". She has also taught at the University of Leeds, where she led extensive outreach with Muslim and non-Muslim communities to widen access to higher education, teaching community courses on Islamic History, Gender in Islam and Arabic Language. Her research sits at the interface of the humanities and social sciences, exploring culture, the arts and activism under authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexuality in cultural practice, and Arab and Muslim diasporas in Western contexts. She works comparatively across Arabophone, Francophone and Anglophone literatures, and is the Maghreb lead of the European Research Council-funded project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies.