Huda Fakhreddine's work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017) and The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Middle Eastern Literatures.
Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman Saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. Her book The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
Courses taught:
The Abbasid Poets: Abū Nuwās, Abū Tammām and al-Mutanabbī
Readings in Classical Arabic Criticism
The Prose Poem in Arabic; Arabic Belles Lettres
Seminar in Arabic Poetry from Pre-Islamic to Modern
Classical/Early Arabic Prose
Middle Eastern Literatures in Translation
Arabic Literature and Literary Theory
Arab Women and War
Modern Arabic Poetry in Translation
Arabic Modernism and the Culture of Literary Magazines
Selected Publications
“Teaching the Abbasid Muḥdathūn at the Global Turn,” Journal of Medieval Worlds 1.4 (2019): 45-56.
“Salīm Barakāt’s Poetry as Linguistic Conquest: …the shot that kills you, may you recover,” Middle Eastern Literatures 22.1 (2019): 134-153.
“Against Cities: On Hijā’ al-mudun in Arabic Poetry,” with Bilal Orfali in The City in Pre-Modern and Modern Arabic Literature, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 38-62.
“The Aesthetic Imperative: History Poeticized,” in Outsider Imperatives: Manifestos for the Future of World Thought, eds. Jason Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2017, 147-154.
“Two Projects of Modernisms in Arabic Poetry,” Journal of Arabic Literature 48 (2017): 28-58.
“Khalīl Ḥāwī and the Burden of Thought,” al-Abḥāth 64 (2016): 25-43.
“The Prose Poem and the Arabic Literary Tradition,” Middle Eastern Literatures 19.3 (2016): 243-259.
“FitzGerald, Rāmī and Umm Kulthūm: The Making of Khayyam in Arabic,” Abḥāth 60 (2016): 87-110.
Other Writings:
“Arabic Modernism’s Other Tradition,” a bi-weekly commentary series for Jacket2, Jan-March 2019. LINK
“Teaching against Stereotypes,” Talk About Teaching & Learning, University of Pennsylvania Almanac 64.31 (2018). LINK