Rama Alhabian

Rama Alhabian is a scholar of modern and premodern Arabic literature, drawing on prior training in English, Anglophone, postcolonial East African, comparative, and world literatures. Her first book project focuses on the Arab Nahda (Renaissance) maqama, a rhymed-prose narrative genre centered on the ruses of a trickster figure, originally invented by Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani in 10th-century Baghdad.

At Hamilton, she teaches courses on Arabic and Anglophone literatures, with special attention to genre, emotion, embodiment, affect, and geopoetics theories. With Hamilton students, Alhabian explores expansive imaginaries of collective identity beyond the confines of modern nationalism and monolingualism by engaging mobility and diaspora, translation and translingualism, and the transhistorical crossings of texts, people, and concepts.

Recent Courses Taught

First Term Arabic
Second Term Arabic
Third Term Arabic
Fourth Term Arabic
Advanced Topics in Language and Culture
Advanced Arabic
Modern Arabic Fiction and Film
Islands in Literature
Petrofictions: Modernity and the Oil Encounter
Postcolonial Detectives: The Crime Novel from the Global South

Research Interests

Modern and Medieval Arabic Literature; Postcolonial Studies and Literature; Geopoetics; Translation and Genre Studies. The Novel and the Sea, Islands in Literature, Science Fiction.

Distinctions

• The John R. Hatch Excellence in Teaching Award, Hamilton College, May 2023. 
• Center for Middle East Studies, the University of Chicago, Great Lakes Adiban Workshop Travel Grant, October 2022. 
• The Levitt Center Social Change Course Development Grant for an advanced course on Petromodernities and the Oil Encounter, Hamilton College, August 2022.

Select Publications

Forthcoming

• “The Maqa¯ma of Yama¯ma” in Sensory History of the Islamic World, vol 3 (2026) eds. Adam Bursi and Christian Lange, Brill.  

Published

• “Multilingual worlds in al-?ariri’s monolingual maqa¯ma¯t:  A study of al-maqa¯ma ar-Raq?a? (the spotted)” in Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, special issue: Translingual and Multilingual Poetics in the Premodern Islamic World of Literature 15.3 (2025), guest ed. Hany Rashwan.
• “Between the Arabic Language and The Frontiers of Knowledge: al-?ariri’s Unknown Island in the ‘Maqama of Oman’” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 55. 1 (2025), themed cluster Early Global Insularities, guest eds. Sara Torres and Nahir Otaño Gracia. 

Book Reviews

• The Maqamat of Badi' Al-Zaman Al-Hamadhani: Authorship, Texts, and Contexts by Bilal Orfali and Maurice Pomerantz, in The Journal of Arabic Literature 55.2-3 (2024).

College Service

• Student Fellowships Committee
• Language Center Advisory Committee
• Middle East/Islamicate World Studies Committee

Professional Affiliations

• American Association of Teaching of Arabic
• American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
• Modern Language Association
• Middle East Studies Association

Appointed to the Faculty

Educational Background

Ph.D., Cornell University
M.A., Cornell University
M.A., King Saud University
B.A., Effat University