Wafaa Abdullatif Abdulaali

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Wafaa Abdullatif Abdulaali is an assistant professor of English literature and language at the University of Mosul in Iraq. Her interests lie in cross-cultural gender and women’s studies, women’s creativity, and poetry. She recently presented a paper, “The Failure of the National/Personal Dream in Times of War: A Study of Poems (Written 1991) by Arab and American Women Poets,” at the 2007 MELUS-India/MELOW conference, “Literature in Times of Violence,” in Chandigarh, India. At Radcliffe, Abdulaali will research and write about war poetry by Arab and American woman poets. She will study poetry written across four decades, from the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Wars (1967) to the present-day Iraq War. Using certain feminist, historicist, and cross-cultural approaches, she will arrive at women’s rhetoric of war beyond cultural bounds. Abdulaali earned her BA in translation and MA in English literature and language from the University of Mosul and her PhD from the University of Baghdad. Her PhD thesis, on the cultural achievements of poets Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Nazil Al-Mala’ika, was a pioneering work in gender and women’s studies in Iraq. She frequently publishes translations in Iraqi and Arab periodicals, and recently published a book of fifty modern English poems translated into Arabic (now out of print). Abdulaali is currently coauthoring a book on an Iraqi woman poet, Andalusian Songs for the Wounds of Iraq: A Face-Page Translation of Bushra Al-Bustani’s Poetry (Mellen Press, forthcoming), and was recently selected as a member of the advisory board of a new Oxford journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing.