Carol Bardenstein

Carol Bardenstein is an Associate Professor of Arabic Language & Culture and Comparative Literature. Her teaching and research focuses primarily on Arabic literary and cultural expression of the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Her scholarship has taken up topics such as translation and the cultural encounter between Europe and the Arab World (in her book Translation and Transformation in Modern Arabic Literature: The Indigenous Assertions of Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal), contested symbols in the Arab-Israeli conflict (in her articles “Threads of Memory in Discourses of Rootedness: Of Trees, Oranges and Prickly-Pear Cactus in Palestine/Israel,” and “Trees, Forests and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory,”), the politics of ‘passing’ in Palestinian and Israeli cinema, (“Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema”) and the cookbook memoirs of Middle Eastern exiles and immigrants (“Beyond Univocal Baklava: Deconstructing Food-as-Ethnicity and the Ideology of Homeland in Diana Abu Jaber’s The Language of Baklava,”and “Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory and Collective Memory in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles.”).

She has taught all levels of Arabic language at U-M, and her other courses focus on such specific topics as “The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Middle Eastern Literature and Film,” “Gender and Representation in the Modern Middle East,” “Middle Eastern Memoirs,” and “Collective Memory.”