Current PhD Students

Leen Bou Nassereddine

Thesis Title:

Coming-of-Age Under No One’s Shadow: Rewriting Growth from the South

Supervisor:

Dr Claire Westall

Description:

My PhD project examines how coming-of-age narratives from the Global South reshape the Bildungsroman through South–South literary dialogue. Focusing on Afro-Arab and Afro-Caribbean novels, my research challenges Eurocentric models of comparison that position the Global North as the primary point of reference. Instead, it places Global South texts in direct conversation with one another to explore how identity, growth, and subject formation are articulated within shared yet distinct postcolonial histories. By foregrounding themes such as migration, belonging, language, and cultural hybridity, my work advances a decolonial comparative framework that treats Afro-Arab and Afro-Caribbean literatures as sovereign sites of theory. Ultimately, this research reimagines the geography of world literature by moving beyond center–periphery models toward a more relational, horizontal understanding of literary development in the Global South.

I am the author of the forthcoming monograph, The Bildungsroman: Re- Birth, Travels, and Conversations Across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red Seas (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2026). The book traces the history and evolution of the Bildungsroman beyond its traditional Western foundations, demonstrating the genre’s global relevance—particularly within postcolonial contexts and from the perspective of Arab female subjects. It examines how the genre adapts as it travels across cultural, historical, and geographical settings, foregrounding movement, translation, and encounter as central to the form.

I am a full-time Lecturer of English at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Dubai, where I teach Writing Seminar courses focused on analytical writing, rhetorical reading, and research-based argumentation, alongside Global Literature courses that examine how stories move across borders, languages, and histories, engaging postcolonial, feminist, and world-literature frameworks to explore questions of empire, migration, translation,
identity, and cultural authority.