Mara Naaman on Three Shifts Reshaping How We Talk About Literature and Culture

• New York writer and scholar Mara Naaman identifies three movements in how contemporary readers, educators, and institutions engage with Arabic literature, American cultural production, and the question of what education is for.

1. Arabic Literature Is No Longer a Niche Concern

New York, USA, 14th May 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — The field of Arabic literature in English translation has grown substantially over the past two decades. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and across the Arab world are reaching broader readerships. Not only was there an increase in works translated following September 11th, but In the past decade, more translations from Arabic to English have been published than any other period prior. Academic programs in Arabic language and literature have expanded at American universities. Mara Naaman has observed this shift throughout her career. 

Her research, which spans Iraqi poetry, Egyptian fiction, and Arab American novels, has consistently argued that these bodies of work deserve the same rigorous critical attention applied to European and American literature. Her book on Cairo’s literary downtown, published by Palgrave Macmillan, brought urban studies methods into Arabic literary criticism in ways that were, at the time of its publication in 2011, less common. 

2. The Question of What Education Is For Is Becoming More Urgent

Debates about the humanities, about the value of a literature degree, about whether universities should prioritize vocational preparation over liberal education, have intensified. Naaman holds a position that is neither nostalgic nor dismissive. She believes humanistic education serves a purpose that vocational training cannot replace, developing the capacity to think carefully, read critically, and engage with complexity.

She has made this argument through her teaching, which has spanned NYU, Columbia, Hofstra, Williams College, and Hunter College, and through her public writing. For many students, a course in comparative literature or Arabic studies is the first time they encounter the breadth of Arabic literary and intellectual thought. That encounter has consequences. Naaman takes them seriously.

3. Scholars Are Moving Between Academic and Creative Modes More Openly

The division between scholarly and creative writing in recent years has blurred. More academics are writing in forms that reach general audiences. More writers with advanced degrees are bringing theoretical rigor into their fiction and essays. Naaman’s approach to creative writing at the City College of New York is informed by her academic background and interest in cultural theory and intellectual history. 

Her novel, currently in progress, depicts the immigration of a family from Iraq to Detroit in the thirties. Told from the perspective of a young woman whose father owns a grocery store in downtown Detroit, the work charts the narrator’s coming of age at the end of World War II during a time of deep racial unrest. Weaving the heady nationalist struggles in Iraq alongside the political tensions in Detroit, the novel examines the challenges and optimism of a generation of Arab immigrants that settled in the Midwest. 

What These Shifts Mean

Together, these trends point toward a cultural moment in which the boundaries of what counts as literary work, who produces it, and what purpose it serves are being renegotiated. Naaman’s career, which has moved between scholarship, editing, teaching, and now fiction writing, reflects that renegotiation in practice.

For readers, students, and anyone who works with language and ideas, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the landscape of literary culture is broader and more varied than it was a generation ago. Engaging with it seriously, on its own terms, remains as worthwhile as it has ever been.

About Mara Naaman
Mara Naaman is a writer, editor, and Arabic literature scholar based in New York, New York. She holds a PhD in Arabic Literature from Columbia University and currently serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at Hunter College. She is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York. Learn more at maranaaman.com.