Dr Asmaa Meftah

Early-career scholar in Modern Arabic Studies (PhD awarded Feb 2026, University of Exeter) specialising in environmental humanities and eco-postcolonial literary criticism. My research examines how Arabic literary texts reconfigure the relationship between land, identity, and nonhuman entities, with particular attention to Palestinian and North African contexts.

I develop an interdisciplinary framework that brings ecocriticism into dialogue with postcolonial theory to analyse ecological memory, environmental dispossession, and forms of cultural and ecological resistance. My work foregrounds concepts such as eco-sumud and eco-memory, demonstrating how landscapes, trees, and animals function as active agents in the preservation of identity and in contesting colonial and environmental violence.

Through comparative close reading across poetry, prose, and film, I position my research within broader debates in environmental humanities, contributing to emerging discussions on environmental justice, more-than-human agency, and the role of literature in articulating alternative ecological epistemologies.

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
• ASLE UK & Ireland

• “Blood, and Olive Oil: Uprooting Trees in Palestine”– CRPLA conference: “Blood on the Leaves”, University of Warwick (2021)
• “Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Contested Landscape” – Tokyo–Exeter Seminar: “Inscribing Knowledge” (2021)
• “Uprooting Trees, Uprooting Identities” – Postgraduate Research Seminar, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter (2020)
• “Landscapes of Conflict” – ‘Out of the Blue’ Conference, University of Sheffield (2020)
• “Nature, Resistance and Eco-Steadfastness” – LCIR Conference: International Conference on Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies, University of London (2019)

• Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (LTHE Stage 1 theory), Autumn 2019
• LTHE (Stage 2 practice), Spring 2020