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

Profile

My general research and teaching interests are in translation studies; modern Arabic and comparative literature; and critical and anticolonial theory. I am particularly interested in Arabic and Turkish critical theory and in South-South comparative methods, as well as in broader questions of (linguistic) equivalence, exchange, and reparation.

My current book project concerns the mutually constitutive relationship between translation and imperial law, and asks how concepts of justice and reparation have been articulated across languages, literatures, and legal systems in the modern Middle East. I also am co-editing a forthcoming volume of translated sources in Arabic intellectual history. Recent and forthcoming 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. My second major research project concerns the Arabic typewriter’s global cultural history.

Prior to my arrival at QMUL 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.

Teaching

In 2023-4, I am convening the MA in Translation and Adaptation Studies and teaching the modules Translation Studies I: Problems, Theories, Terms and Translation Studies II: Translation, Empire, and Law. I also welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate research on modern Arabic and comparative literatures; the cultural and media history of the Middle East; and critical, ecocritical, and translation theory.

Research

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

2024                ‘On Translation and Being Just: The Arabic Novel and the British Archive.’ Comparative Literature (forthcoming).

2023                ‘A Case of Multiple Identities: Uncanny Histories of the Arabic Typewriter.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies (in press).

2020                ‘Loan-Words: Economy, Equivalence, and Debt in the Arabic Translation Debates’, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 57, Issue 2, pp. 187-209.

Winner: American Comparative Literature Association A. Owen Aldridge Prize

2017                ‘Nahḍa: Mapping a Keyword in Cultural Discourse’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Vol 37, pp. 50-84.

Chapters in Edited Volumes

2023                (with Bridget Gill) ‘“Pour Our Treasures Into Foreign Laps”: The Translation of Othello into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish” in ed. Marilyn Booth and Claire Savina, Ottoman Translations: Circulating Texts from Bombay to Paris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 69-98.

2020                ‘Problems of Method: Applying “Western Literary Theory” to Arabic Texts’ in Lorraine Charles, Ilan Pappé, Monica Ronchi (eds.) Researching the Middle East: Cultural, Conceptual and Theoretical Issues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 181-194.

Review Articles

2020                ‘Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt by Samah Selim’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 52, Issue 3, pp. 567-569.

Translations

2018                ‘Amerchiche’ by Karima Nadir in Marrakech Noir (Akashic Books, Noir Series).