Margaret Litvin

Fall 2023 Student Drop-in Hours: STH 634,  T 11-12, Wed 12-1.

Margaret Litvin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature. She teaches courses including “Global Shakespeares,” “1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination,” “Arabic Translation & Interpreting,” and the bilingual course “Intro to Arabic Literature,” as well as courses in the Core social science and Literary Translation MFA sequences. She also founded BU’s interdisciplinary Middle East and North Africa Studies major in 2014 and has advised the Arabic minor since 2009. She welcomes prospective student inquiries about the BU MFA in Literary Translation.

Litvin’s research aims to help situate modern Arabic cultural production in its world literary context. She has published on Arabic rewritings of Shakespeare (the 2011 book Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost and related articles); on post-2001 global Arab/ic theatre; and on the literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet literary ties. Most recently she has co-edited the primary source anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History with historians Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova (Oxford, 2023); won a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant to translate al-Hayy al-Rusi (The Russian Quarter) by Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez; and published an article about “racist inclusion” in Soviet student dormitories and international novels about them (Comparative Literature, June 2023). This year she is completing a long-simmering book titled Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams and co-translating a memoir by Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi (1905-1979).

Margaret Litvin’s CV

Watch Professor Litvin’s lecture, “Tongue-Tied Internationalism: Adventures with a Soviet Setting, an Egyptian Novel, and an Indian Press”, presented at BU’s Translation Seminar (April 10, 2020)

Read an interview with Professor Litvin, “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: The Bilingual Course, Backwards” a discussion about CAS LY 350.

Read Professor Litvin’s essay about teaching Literary Translation at Boston University

Read an interview with Professor Litvin on the blog for Transregional Research, Berlin. “I want to see more rising scholars with large and diverse language sets and really transnational interests – 5in10 with Margaret Litvin”

Watch Professor Litvin’s lecture “Shall We Be or Not Be: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Anxieties of Arab Nationalism.”

Visit Professor Litvin’s Personal Website

Discussion with director Hani Afifi at Cairo University, 2011

Interview with BBC Arabic on Arabic Chekhov adaptations, 2022

Visit to a Hamlet class in Gaza, 2020