MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

• xenaamro2026@u.northwestern.edu

Xena Amro is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in cross-temporal Arabic literary traditions, with a focus on the Islamic risālah (epistle). Since 2022, she has contributed to manuscript-centered pedagogy as a graduate assistant at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), digitally preserving rare Islamic manuscripts alongside their transcriptions and translations.

Her professional experience includes serving as a graduate assistant at the Journal of Arabic Literature, coordinating the Language Curricula and Gender working group at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and chairing the Graduate Student Committee of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Advisory Board. 

In 2025, she was granted a residential fellowship at the Orient-Institut Beirut. In 2024, she received the Paris Program in Critical Theory fellowship at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris III, as well as the John Hunwick Research Fund from ISITA, which she had also earned in 2022. In 2023, she attended the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. In 2022, she won the Best Graduate Seminar Paper Award for her article "In Search of Lost Proust: The Translator and the Comparatist." That summer, she participated in the Summer School on Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World at Leiden University’s Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS).

She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the Lebanese American University, where she studied abroad at Barnard College of Columbia University as a Global UGRAD scholarship recipient, and an M.A. in English Literature from the American University of Beirut, which included a year at Uppsala University in Sweden through an Erasmus+ scholarship.