Asmaa Hassaneen and Miguel Alirangues López are our guest researchers here at FMSP this summer term 2021.
Asmaa Hassaneen is a PhD fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric, Aarhus University, Denmark. The title of her project is Memory Hunters: The Family Saga as a Travelling Memory of Palestine in Selected Texts. Her project investigates the relation between the saga genre and memory, and how both affect the construction and transmission of Palestinian memory. Interviews will be conducted with members of the Palestinian community in Aarhus as one segment of Palestinians in diaspora. This double focus is to test fictional and real forms, contents, and practices through which the memory of Palestine has travelled across time and space, which helped shape and define the Palestinian national identity in diaspora, especially within the Danish context. The study participates in a growing effort in academia, especially in memory studies, that addresses and regulates tensions resulting from the growing numbers of Middle Eastern, mainly Muslim, immigrants in Europe, by broadening the frameworks of understanding immigrant cultures and identities.
Miguel Alirangues López is a doctoral researcher in Literature at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds a FPU (Training Program for University Teachers) fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Universities in the Department of Humanities: Philosophy, Language and Literature. His thesis “The Wound in the Word. Towards a Literary Theory of the Negativity of Harm” aims to elaborate a theoretical approach that addresses the way in which literature is a privileged discourse of elaboration of the negative dimension of historical experiences of harm. To this end, the project develops a study of the category of negativity and its fundamental role in explaining both the experiences of harm and the concept of fiction in the tradition of Critical Theory. He is a member of the R&D project “Subjects, Emotions, Structures: Project for a Critical Social Theory” (FFI 2016-75073-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University and Essex University.