Convener of Arabic, Associate Professor of Arabic & Comparative Literature
On research leave spring 2026 (Henderson Senior Fellowship, BU Center for the Humanities). Office hours by appointment.
Margaret Litvin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature. Her research explores modern Arabic literature’s global entanglements, from adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet ties. She is the author of two solo-authored books, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011) and Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance (Princeton, forthcoming). Her collaborative projects include the anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, co-edited with historians Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova, and the memoir of Soviet-educated Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi, co-translated with two then-BU undergraduates. Other publications analyze the Cold War struggle over Tolstoy, the “intimate foreign relations” of Soviet student dormitories, the theatre of the Arab “spring,” and the vagaries of Arabic plays for non-Arabic-speaking audiences. She has translated Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Ice and several Arabic plays. Her current project, a translation of the 2019 novel al-Hayy al-Rusi (The Russian Quarter) by exiled Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez, is supported by a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and by the BU Center on Forced Displacement; its tentative English title is The Sleepless Giraffe of Damascus. Future projects include a collective biography of Najati and Lotka Sidqi titled A Daughter Named Internationale: The True Story of an Impossible Palestinian Family.
At BU, Litvin teaches “War in Arabic Literature & Film,” “Global Shakespeares,” “1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination,” “Arabic Translation & Interpreting,” and the bilingual course “Intro to Arabic Literature.” She also teaches in the Core social science sequence and in the MFA in Literary Translation program. She founded BU’s interdisciplinary major in Middle East and North Africa Studies in 2014 and has advised the Arabic minor since 2009. She welcomes prospective student inquiries about the BU MFA in Literary Translation, the Arabic minor, and potential undergraduate research projects in Arabic.
Some public-facing essays:
- “Demagogy or Pedagogy? A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus” (Inside Higher Ed, 2025)
- An Ex-Soviet Jew Looks at Syrian Refugees and America (Marginalia Review of Books, 2015)
- “Between Love and Justice: Teaching Literary Translation at Boston University” (Asymptote, 2014)
Coverage of Prof. Litvin’s work:
- Humanists at Work profile by Roni Lakin (BUCH, March 2025)
- Interview: “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: The Bilingual Course, Backwards” (ArabLit, 2018).
- “I want to see more rising scholars with large and diverse language sets and really transnational interests” (Transregional Studies Forum, Berlin, 2016)
Guest teaching and lectures:
- BBC Arabic interview on Arabic Chekhov adaptations (2022)
- “Tongue-Tied Internationalism: Adventures with a Soviet Setting, an Egyptian Novel, and an Indian Press” (BU Literary Translation Seminar, 2020)
- Visit to a Hamlet class in Gaza, 2020
- Discussion with director Hani Afifi at Cairo University, 2011
- “Shall We Be or Not Be: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Anxieties of Arab Nationalism” (2007)