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 doctoral study is grounded in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I am focused on diasporic, postcolonial, and decolonial literatures, and their related critical theories. My research is often intersected with queer & trans studies; Black queer feminisms; as well as postcolonial and Third World Marxisms. I believe that it’s crucial to assert radical and subversive historiographical and analytical methods when engaging with these texts, both literary and theoretical.

My prospective research and dissertation looks to diasporic Palestinian literature for a phenomenological depiction of space, and subsequently to interrogate conceptions of mobility and movement, nationalism, geography, and place. Unsurprisingly, I’m frequently engaged with the works of the great poet Mahmoud Darwish.

At Loyola I have worked as a Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant, and Instructor of Record. 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.

Exterior to 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.

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