Arabs in Australia: Local Concerns and Transnational Contexts

Jumana Bayeh is Lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia, and an Honorary Associate of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She has held research fellowships at the University of Toronto (2014), University of Edinburgh (2013), the University of Copenhagen (2011), and the Lebanese American University in Beirut (2007). She is the author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and Transnational Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015) as well as a number of book chapters and articles on Arab diaspora fiction. Her current project examines the representation of the nation-state in Arab diaspora literature, from writers based in Australia, North America, and the United Kingdom.

Sahar Amer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in Arab and Muslim societites, Arab diasporas, and postcolonial identities. She is the author of Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008), which received the MLA's 2009 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. More recently, she published What is Veiling? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).