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Languages, Linguistics and Film

Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar, BA (Oxon), PhD (New York University)

Hannah

Lecturer in Comparative Literature

Email: h.scottdeuchar@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne 1.37
Office Hours: Mondays, 11am-1pm

Profile

My research and teaching interests are in modern Middle Eastern literature, media, and translation; critical and legal theory; and histories of culture and technology in the Global South. I am particularly interested in South-South comparative methods, and in the intersections of literature, technology, and law.  

 My first book project, Translational Justice: Empire, Law, and the Arabic Literary Archive, argues that translation played a foundational role in the making, administration, and contestation of colonial law. It charts how translingual concepts of justice and reparation have been re/articulated across literatures and legal systems in the modern Middle East, and echo in settler-colonial contexts today. Recent publications address iterations of race in Arabic and Ottoman translations of Othello, materialist approaches to Arabic translation history, and the invention of the Arabic typewriter. A co-edited volume of translated sources in Arabic intellectual history titled Modern Arab Thought: A Reader is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. My second major research project, which I am pursuing with the help of a BA/Leverhulme research grant, concerns the unstudied global history of the Arabic typewriter 

I completed my PhD at New York University in 2021, where I was a MacCracken Fellow, a Social Science Research Council Fellow, and a Carola Collier Berthelot Fellow. In 2025/6 I will be a Humboldt Research Fellow at EUME Berlin. 

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