Carol W.N. Fadda grew up in Beirut, Lebanon where she earned her B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut. She graduated from Purdue University in 2006 with a Ph.D. in contemporary American Literature. Her research interests in Arab and Muslim American Studies, American Studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and transnational studies interrogate structures, logics, and manifestations of US empire, militarization, and exceptionalism that determine the lives of racialized communities in the US and abroad. Her first book Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (NYU Press, 2014) engages an array of Arab American literary and visual texts from the 1990s onwards that contest negative representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US. In it, Fadda emphasizes feminist, anti-assimilationist, and transnational modes of Arab American and Muslim American belonging that contest the conceived boundaries of the US nation-state and transform hegemonic forms of national membership and citizenship.

Her current book-length project, Carceral States and Dissident Citizenships: Narratives of Resistance in an Age of “Terror” highlights US global carceral practices by focusing on Arab and Muslim narratives and testimonials of incarceration and confinement coming out of the “War on Terror.” Her study extends to legal and historical documents, literary texts, visual documentation, and political discourse emerging from secret and extra-legal incarceration sites including the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.

She is the recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, and a Syracuse University Humanities Center Fellowship. Her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma, cross-racial solidarities, and transnational belonging have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections.

She serves as the editor of the Critical Arab American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press.

Arab and Muslim American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, transnational American studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, race and empire studies, US minority literatures and cultures, comparative race and ethnic studies, global Anglophone literatures and cultures.

“Living in a Country that Does not Know Us.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. 8.2 (2019):17-23.

“Arab, Asian, and Muslim Feminist Dissent: Responding to the “Global War on Terror” in Relational Frameworks.” Spec. issue of Amerasia: Arab/Americas: Locations and Iterations 44.1 (2018): 1-25.

“Intersections of Arab American and Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. June 2019.

“The Poetics of Torture in Philip Metres’ Sand Opera.” Arab American Aesthetics. Ed. Therí Pickens. New York: Routledge, 2018. 12-28.

#IslamophobiaIsRacism Syllabus: Resource for Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States (2018). Prepared by: Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana.

https://islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com/

Rizkallah, Jess. “There is a Country to be Built: A Conversation with Jess Rizkallah, Winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.” Interview with Carol N. Fadda. Los Angeles Review of Books. April 14, 2017.

https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/jess-rizkallah

“Arab American Citizenship in Crisis: Destabilizing Representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US after 9/11.” Spec. issue of Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 532-55. Rpt. in Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Ed. John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 194-216.