Carol W.N. Fadda

Carol W.N. Fadda grew up in Beirut, Lebanon where she earned her B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut. She graduated from Purdue University in 2006 with a Ph.D. in contemporary American Literature. Her research interests in Arab and Muslim American Studies, American Studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and transnational studies interrogate structures, logics, and manifestations of US empire, militarization, and exceptionalism that determine the lives of racialized communities in the US and abroad. Her first book Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (NYU Press, 2014) engages an array of Arab American literary and visual texts from the 1990s onwards that contest negative representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US. In it, Fadda emphasizes feminist, anti-assimilationist, and transnational modes of Arab American and Muslim American belonging that contest the conceived boundaries of the US nation-state and transform hegemonic forms of national membership and citizenship.

Her current book-length project, Carceral States and Dissident Citizenships: Narratives of Resistance in an Age of “Terror” highlights US global carceral practices by focusing on Arab and Muslim narratives and testimonials of incarceration and confinement coming out of the “War on Terror.” Her study extends to legal and historical documents, literary texts, visual documentation, and political discourse emerging from secret and extra-legal incarceration sites including the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.

She is the recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, and a Syracuse University Humanities Center Fellowship. Her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma, cross-racial solidarities, and transnational belonging have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections.

She serves as the editor of the Critical Arab American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press.