Shirin Assa

Shirin Assa is a Research Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth. Her work focuses on English and Anglophone literatures, with a specialization in the cultural positionalities of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) women in diaspora.

Research Interests

• Intersectional resistance in diasporic identity formation
• Transnational feminism and its complementarity with intersectionality theory
• Colonial/Orientalist representation of MENA women
• Migration studies (post-2015 MENA diasporas)
• Gender and sexuality in postcolonial literature
• Methodological innovation in literary analysis

Current Project

Her dissertation project, MENA Women in Diaspora: Poetics of Intersectional Resistance Versus Geometry of Appropriation, examines resistance paradigms in contemporary literature through Leila Aboulela's Ostrich (2018) and Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017).