Home Page/Main Text — Yasmeen Ayoub, MA

“Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affect how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other human beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”
-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

These words from Ngũgĩ eloquently articulate a major framework in my research as well as a cornerstone of my appreciation for the work that arises from literary studies. I hope to contribute to the discipline by continually looking to and interrogating the relationship between literature and material realities shaped by power, struggle, and knowledge.

My prospective dissertation looks to Palestinian literature’s rendering of spatiality to assert a phenomenological experience of space distinct to diasporic and exiled peoples. I’m therefore concerned with and interrogative of conceptions of mobility, movement, nationalism, geography, and place, which often necessitates interdisciplinary research and a variety of interlocutors. Primarily situated within the field of postcolonial literature and its respective theories and criticisms, I’m also frequently engaged with the works of Mahmoud Darwish.

At Loyola I have worked as a Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant, and Instructor of Record in both Writing and Literature courses.

As a university Instructor of Writing, I take seriously the obligation I have to not only teach my students to write well but to think critically so that they can write rhetorically. With training in Rhetoric & Composition Pedagogy, I’m confident in implementing variant teaching methods to best meet the needs & inquisitions of my students. To equip my students with the tools necessary for successful, sophisticated, and holistic argumentation, I priortize not only the conventions of good writing, but skills in rhetorical analysis and explication.

Alongside my training in Rhetoric & Composition Pedagogy, I am trained in Feminist and Critical Pedagogies. My forthcoming teaching statement will reflect my commitment to the principles of Critical Pedagogy, as I am firmly dedicated to the co-creation of knowledge alongside my students, rather than to bestow from above.

You are viewing my official & singular portfolio and website. I am also on LinkedIn.

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