Angela Naimou

Angela Naimou is an Associate Professor of English at Clemson University’s College of Arts and Humanities, where she teaches literatures of the Middle East and North Africa, postcolonial and world literatures, American literatures of race/ethnicity/migration, and world literature. She serves as Editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development and has held editorial roles at Contemporary Literature and College Literature. Her research bridges literary form, legal theory, and political movements, with a focus on how aesthetics interrogate legal personhood's fictions.

• Ph.D., English, Cornell University
• M.A., English, Cornell University
• B.A., English, University of Michigan

Her scholarship engages anti-colonial/postcolonial theory, race/diaspora/migration studies, law and literature intersections, and world literature in translation. She explores how legal fictions—from the 19th-century maritime law to modern refugee policy—shape narratives of exclusion and survival.

Recent publications analyze legal precedent’s role in global fiction, refugee temporalities, and war’s banalization in cultural discourse. Her work critiques liberal legal frameworks and death-bound biopolitical paradigms, advocating for decolonizing methodologies that prioritize marginalized voices.

• ASAP Book Prize (2015) for Salvage Work
• MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize Honorable Mention (2015) for Salvage Work

At Clemson, Naimou collaborates on the Every Campus a Refuge initiative, integrating refugee resettlement advocacy with academic research. She is currently studying contemporary Arabic literature and refugee narratives to expand her analysis of global border regimes and humanitarian practices.