Asmaa Hassaneen

Asmaa Hassaneen is a guest researcher at FMSP from April to June 2021. She is a PhD fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric, Aarhus University, Denmark. Asmaa has a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Sohag University, Egypt, and a master’s degree in Children’s Literature from Cairo University, Egypt. Academically, she has a keen interest in interdisciplinary research, where literature has this reciprocal relationship with history, world politics, geopolitics, cinema, and art, among many other fields of human activity. She pays special attention to the implications of genre and its significance in generating specific meanings in certain contexts. Her master’s thesis is on the Harry Potter books, their place in the fantasy genre, and their significance to the so-called context of post 9-11 war on terror.

Asmaa Hassaneen is doing her PhD research on Palestinian memory, 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.