She has spent decades moving between languages, cities, and disciplines. The work, she insists, has always been the point.
The Shape of a Life Made From Reading
The northern woods of Michigan are not an obvious place to begin a story about Arabic literature. But for Mara Naaman, an independent scholar, writer, and editor based in New York’s Washington Heights, that is precisely where things started to take shape. A teenager who had already devoted years to studying dance, she left her home in Michigan to attend Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding school for the performing arts tucked into the state’s lake country. It was a first step toward a life organized around creative discipline and serious inquiry, though she could not have known then where that life would lead.
It led, eventually, to Cairo.
Between her years at Wesleyan University, where she majored in English and began studying Arabic, and her doctoral work at Columbia, Naaman spent time living and researching in Egypt. She was there to learn the language properly, to move through the city she was writing about, to understand downtown Cairo not as a theoretical space but as a place people actually inhabited. That period of immersion, she has said, shaped the way she sees the relationship between literature and the urban world it comes from.
The Cairo Book
Her first book, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo, emerged from her doctoral dissertation at Columbia, where she received high honors. The study traces the transformation of Cairo’s historic downtown from its origins as a French-inspired Belle Epoque vision to its more recent life as a contested and eventually neo-bohemian public sphere. Working across urban studies scholarship, Arabic literary criticism, and cultural theory, Naaman used the work of several Egyptian novelists to examine what this particular stretch of city meant for ideas of modernity, class, and the ongoing struggle against colonial legacies.
The book received attention from scholars across the field. Timothy Mitchell of Columbia called it an original, intelligent, and imaginative contribution that drew the reading of contemporary Arabic literature into a broader set of concerns about modernity, national identity, class, ethnic conflict, and the experience of urban life. Elliott Colla of Georgetown noted that what emerged from Naaman’s discussion was a definable new literary school whose sites, themes, and styles marked a radical departure from earlier ones.
The book was published in 2011. The following year, crowds gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the world found itself looking at the very geography Naaman had spent years examining.
Between Two Literatures
Naaman’s academic work has rarely stayed in one place. Her published articles have moved between Iraqi poetry and Arab American fiction, between Egyptian literary modernism and the politics of the Arabic literature curriculum in American universities. She has written about the novels of Mona Simpson as a kind of invisible ethnic text, about Sonallah Ibrahim’s fiction as an investigation of imperial entanglement, and about what it means to try to teach experimental Arabic writing to undergraduate readers who have no access to the original language.
That last question, about translation, pedagogy, and access, runs through much of her work. Naaman trained in both English and Arabic literary traditions and has spent her career moving between them, in classrooms and in print. She was an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Arabic at Williams College for seven years. She has contributed essays and reviews to the Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, the Arab Studies Journal, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, among others.
She has also worked on the editorial side of academic publishing. She served as book review editor for the Journal of Arabic Literature and as academic editor for the Association of Language Departments (ADFL), a subsidiary of the Modern Language Association, where she later worked as Associate Director of Programs. Her commercial editing background includes work at The Reference Works and Columbia University Press.
Roots and Relocations
Naaman was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in Michigan, raised by a single mother who worked as a secretary during the day and painted at night. Her grandparents were from Mosul, Iraq, and had emigrated to Detroit in the 1930s to open a grocery store. She grew up surrounded by a large extended family of Arab relatives, which she has described as warm and deracinated in equal measure, people who had crossed an ocean and remade themselves in the Midwest without quite leaving everything behind.
Dance was her first serious discipline. She studied it through high school with enough dedication to earn a place at Interlochen, a school that does not take that kind of commitment lightly. Later, at Wesleyan, she won a Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Fellowship and went on to earn a string of competitive fellowships at Columbia, including a Fulbright IIE Scholarship that took her to Cairo for a year of research. In 2022 she received the University of Chicago Outstanding Educator Award.
The Work That Remains
These days Naaman spends most of her days writing and caring for her family. She continues to take on academic and commercial editing projects and is also pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York where she is at work on a novel.
The through line in Naaman’s work, across her academic work, teaching, and creative writing, is a sustained interest in what literature reveals about the places and people it comes from. Not as allegory, not as sociology, but as a form of knowledge that does something texts in other modes cannot. That conviction, rooted in the Iraqi-American immigrant story she grew up inside of and sharpened by years of living between languages, has guided a career that has moved steadily, if not always in a straight line, toward the book she is now writing.
Washington Heights, where she lives with her husband and two children, is not so far from the neighborhoods she once mapped in Cairo. They are both places where people have remade themselves, where the old city and the new one press against each other, where the question of what it means to belong is never quite settled. For a scholar who has spent her career asking that question through literature, it is, perhaps, exactly the right place to finish a novel.
