Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World

Join us as Atef Alshaer reflects on the role of Arabic poetry in political culture, from the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring. He will be in conversation with Dina Matar. In his book of the same title, Alshaer looks at the poetry and influence of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the role of poetry in Palestinian Islamist movements and the work of poets at the time of the revolutionary movements of this century in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria.

Atef Alshaer lectures in Arabic Language and Culture at the University of Westminster. He has several publications on the Arab world on language, literature and politics. He is the author of Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World published in 2016, and co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication.

Dina Matar works on the intersection of politics, culture and communication in the Arab World. She is interested in narrative, media, cultural politics, social movements, oral history and memory, particularly in relation to Palestine. She is author of What it Means to be Palestinian, co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon and co-editor of Gaza as Metaphor and Narrating Conflict in the Middle East.