Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20th century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history.

SPEAKER
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As Principal Investigator, she led the European Research Council project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) and creator of the Arabic-language podcast Balad min Kalam: Conversations on Palestinian Literature available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

VENUE
Faculty House
Directions

REGISTRATION
Open to CUID holders.
Members of the public can attend if they register 48 hours in advance of the event by emailing rma2152@columbia.edu.

Organized by the Arabic Seminar and co-sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies and the Middle East Institute.