Salam Darwazah

Salam Darwazah Mir earned both her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. For her doctoral specialty in Postcolonial Literature, she integrated Palestinian Literature into the list, earning her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland, USA. Her choice reflects her recognition of the imaginative impulse and the significance of the humanities at large to shape the human imaginary.

Salam’s belief in the value of education and life-long learning has
taken her to many countries in the Arab world and the US where she taught English writing and literature for more than 20 years. In the US, she taught professional writing at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, and she held the position of Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar and Lasell University, USA.

In the fall semester, 2015, she was a visiting professor of English at Birzeit University, Palestine. She had also volunteered and held a week-long workshop for Palestinian teachers of English, at the A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, Palestine, over three summers.

After retiring from teaching, Salam has continued her research scholarship
and penned many articles and book reviews for Arab Studies Quarterly, for which she has served as book review editor from 2016 until the present. Salam translated and published a collection of stories, titled, A Party for Thaera: Palestinian Women Write Life in Prison, ed. Haifa Zangana, and trans.

Salam Darwazah Mir (New Delhi: WomenUnlim, 2021). Her recent monograph, titled, Transnational Literature of Resistance: Guyana and Palestine, 1950s-1970s, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024.

It links two resistance literatures from the Global South by exploring
the intersectionality of history and literature, as poets and fiction writers express their struggle for liberation against colonialism and settler colonialism at a specific historical moment.