Rita Sakr

I joined the Department of English at Maynooth University in January 2018 as Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures, after being Lecturer in World Literature at Goldsmiths (University of London), and previously, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut (Max Weber Foundation), ESRC “Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research” Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent, and visiting lecturer and fellow at UCD (English and Clinton Institute for American Studies), having completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK. My teaching and research interests include literary and cultural production engaging forced displacement, postcolonialism and decoloniality, Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean studies, modern Arab (including diasporic) literature and film, modern Turkish and Kurdish literature in translation, critical geographies and the environmental humanities, (more-than-)human rights and humanitarianism, peacekeeping and peace-building, and interdisciplinary post-conflict memory studies.

Recent and forthcoming publications focus on cultural production (primarily Arab) at the crossroads of decoloniality, necropolitics, more-than-human rights, the environmental and medical humanities and experimental literatures of displacement. I am currently completing my third monograph titled Arab Displacements: Experimental Literature, Necropolitics and Decolonial Hauntology (under contract with Edinburgh University Press).

I am a member of the editorial team of the Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture (June 2023) and co-editor of Contemporary Arabic Literature and Migration: New Poetics and Perspectives (I. B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic 2025).

Recently completed and ongoing research supervision includes: "The Production of Space and its Subversive Functions in Contemporary Lebanese Literature" (Farah Aridi, Goldsmiths, completed); "The Body and the Environment in Contemporary Iraqi Literature" (Reema Hassan, MU, ongoing); "Literary Representations of the Environmental Impact of the IT Industry" (Florian Radtke, MU:, ongoing) and as mentor for the IRC-funded postdoctoral project "The Language of Refuge" (Edmund Chapman, ongoing).

I am senior co-investigator, with Prof Sinead McGilloway (Principal Investigator-Founder Director of Maynooth Centre for Mental Health and Community Research), on a funded (QFI) research programme, titled SALaM-Ireland (Phase 1: 2020-2023; Phase 2: 2023-24), part of an international collaboration based at the University of Washington in St Louis. This is a mixed-methods engaged research project that seeks to assess the psychosocial needs of post-primary school students resettled to Ireland from Arab-majority countries and to identify potential school-based and creative strategies to foster support for this population.

From 2016 to 2019, I was a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association.

I am a member of the Board of Literature Ireland.

Since 2016, I have been commissioning editor for the Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African (including diasporic) Literatures and Cultures volumes of the Literary Encyclopedia.

I was a Judge of the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award.