Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of English and an Associate Faculty in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. She studied at the Free University of Berlin and the American University of Beirut and completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar Lüst Research Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange and the 2008 Annemarie Schimmel Research Award. In 2017/18, she was an invited resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study / Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature and intersects with cultural and intellectual history. Grounded in modern Arabic studies yet interdisciplinary in scope, it engages with the Arabic novel, life writing/biography, memory studies, interrelations of word and image, and aesthetics and politics. Her most recent book, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia University Press 2024), is about a group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals who came together in British Mandate Palestine across religious lines (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). Through the lens of a group portrait, it invites us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. She is the author of two other books, Reading across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2022) and Geschichten über Geschichten: Erinnerung im Romanwerk von Elias Khoury (2001), which were published in the Reichert Verlag’s Literatures in Context series. In addition, she has co-edited a range of volumes, among them The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (Cambridge University Press 2021), Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Ashgate 2012), and Writing a ‘Tool for Change’: Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered (MIT EJMES 2007).