Danah Alfailakawi joined the Literature Section in the summer of 2023 as a Diversity Predoctoral Fellow. We recently received news that Danah is now the Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department of the University of Colorado Boulder!
Professor Alfailakawi received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with Graduate Emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies, from the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a literary scholar, she conducts research in the areas of Global South and transnational feminisms, queer-of-color epistemologies, Indigenous ecologies and posthumanist futurity, and minority literatures of the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region.
Her current book project investigates the rise of the petrochemical throughout the Arabian Peninsula as a function of the ontological underpinning of colonial-imperial fabrications of spatiality, temporality, narrativity, and subjectivity. In addition, she is presently translating the collection of essays Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Audre Lorde, 1984) from English to Modern Standard Arabic to be submitted for publication. Her creative works have appeared in Electric Marronage and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ PubLab, and her scholarly research has been supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kuwait University. Born at noon in August in Kuwait, she writes of home.
Danah will be teaching (LGBT 2000 / WGST 2000) Intro to LGBTQ Studies, (WGST 3020) Methods of Feminist Inquiry and Praxis, and (WGST 2050) Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture this Fall 2026: Learn more here: https://www.colorado.edu/wgst/