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Professor Yasmine Shamma

Professor of Literature

Faculty and Department

  • Faculty of Arts Cultures and Education
  • School of Humanities

Qualifications

  • MA
  • PhD / DPhil (University of Oxford)

Summary

Dr Yasmine Shamma is Professor of Literature at the University of Hull, where she engages with research and teaching on contemporary literature and migration. She is the author of multiple publications in print and forthcoming, which have been awarded prizes from international bodies including PEN America, the Leverhulme Trust, and the British Academy. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford.

Most Recently, Yasmine's Broken Arabic: When We Talk about Home was announced the winner of the PEN/American Jean Stein Oral History Prize, for offering "compelling prose" which "insists that migration crises can have never-ending and multi-generational consequences."

Previous books include Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (OUP, 2018), Joe Brainard's Art (editor, EUP, 2019), Migration Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2023), and the carefully curated Conversations with the New York School (EUP, 2025). She is currently completing a monograph, Forms of Displacement, which attends to the shapes conversations around displacement take in literary forms, alongside the aforementioned Broken Arabic, a creative non-fiction trade book on what refugees and the displaced make of "home" when it is lost.

Yasmine is also the author of over a dozen peer-reviewed articles and interviews. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Magazine, the American Book Review, The Review of English Studies, Jacket, Empty Mirror, and PN Review, and other publications.

In 2019 her work on refugee senses of home in displacement was awarded an international British Academy grant, which supported the curation of a digital archive on migration. In 2020, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, for her study of the refugee experience of home-making. In 2021 she was awarded further grants and fellowships for her work on testimonies of displacement, including an Arts Council Grant. Alongside Dr Rona Cran, she is also co-founder and co-director of the Network for New York School Studies , which is supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has judged several poetry prizes, and serves as a peer-reviewer for UK funding bodies. She often engages public audiences on the topic of migration through radio and TV interviews with the BBC. She has also delivered invited key note speeches to international conferences from the US to Europe.

In her spare time she organises writing and reading workshops for refugees, in efforts to offer space for the processing of the trauma of displacement in art, pursing the possibility of cultivating refuge in writing.

Poetry

Modern Literature

American Literature

World Literature

Women's Literature

Eco-Criticism

Postcolonial Literature

Refugee Studies

Recent outputs

View more outputs

Book Chapter

Making Home in the Earth: Ecoglobalism in the Camps

Shamma, Y. (2023). Making Home in the Earth: Ecoglobalism in the Camps. In Y. Shamma, S. Ilcan, V. Squire, & H. Underhill (Eds.), Migration, Culture and Identity: Making Home Away (147-167). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_8

Research interests

I am the author of Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (OUP, 2018), the editor of Joe Brainard's Art (EUP, 2019), lead editor of Migration Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2023), interviewer / editor of Conversations with the New York School: Not Really Real (EUP, 2024), and author of over a dozen peer-reviewed articles and interviews.

I am currently completing a monograph, Forms of Displacement, which attends to the shapes conversations around displacement take in literary forms, and Words for Home, a creative non-fiction trade book on what refugees and the displaced make of "home" when it is lost. In 2024, my trade publication (in progress), Words for Home, was awarded the winner of the PEN/American Jean Stein Oral History Prize, for offering "compelling prose" which "insists that migration crises can have never-ending and multi-generational consequences."

I am intersted in the following areas of Literature; Contemporary Poetry; American Literature; Postcolonial Literature; Eco-criticism; Feminism; Migration studies; Refugee Studies; World Literature; Avant-garde; Poetry

Postgraduate supervision

Contemporary Poetry

Migration in Literature

Refugee Literature

Modern Poetry

Awards and prizes

PENN America Award for Oral History

2024

Yasmine Shamma, How to Wait: What Refugees Teach Us About Living in Waiting At a crucial time of global attention and anguish about questions of displacement, home and belonging in the Middle East, Yasmine Shamma’s How to Wait: What Refugees Teach Us About Living in Waiting is an urgently needed book. Deeply personal, well informed, and highly researched over nine years in the Levant and worldwide, Shamma’s compelling prose insists that migration crises can have never-ending and multi-generational consequences. With her more than 75 interviews with refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers, Shamma grounds political theory and philosophy in lived experience. Her narrators’ experience is also her own: as a descendant of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, Shamma deftly weaves between her own narrative and others, reflecting on the ways they echo, harmonize, and create dissonance.

AHRC Research Networking Grant

2021 - 2024

Co-investigator alongside PI Dr Rona Cran on grant funding the creation of the Network for New York School Studies.

Arts Council Grant

2020 - 2022

Arts Council National Lottery Grant, for "Making Drama out of Crisis" | 2021 - 2022 I serve as a co-investigator and part of Jude Haste's team on this grant.

British Academy Being Human Award

2020 - 2020

Grant supporting "Making Home Away: Tented Lives of Refugees". This pop-up tent exhibit will actively seek to engage public audiences in the town centre of Reading, in the Autumn of 2020.

British Academy Summer Showcase Grant

2020 - 2020

This life-size interactive display of a Syrian refugee's tent invites visitors to walk through and around it, so to imagine what it feels like to live in such temporary spaces. This grant funded the co-creation of this tent with a resettled refugee in the UK, and a co-exhibitor from Jordan.

British Academy International Grant

2019 - 2021

This project centres on the descriptions of homes that have been lost and found by refugees of the recent Syrian crisis. Experiences of urban life are negotiated in particularly complex ways by refugees moving across regions and nations in pursuit of home. In these negotiations, they expand the dimensions of home. How do the mobile dimensions of home constitute programs of making and remaking home, while also underscoring testimonies of migration, displacement and resettlement? Incorporating a digital archive, this project situates the contemporary refugee's pursuit as part of a larger 20th century project of post-camp migration and re-settlement. The digital archive will represent different disciplinary approaches, revisiting archived materials while hosting new materials. As this project's main focus, the archive aims to enhance international understanding of the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis while encouraging policy makers to rethink policy reform, within the UK and beyond. This archive is part of the "Lost and Found: Testimonies of Migration, Resettlement, and Displacement" project funded by the British Academy's "Tackling the UKs International Challenges" grant scheme. It is led by Principal Investigator Dr Yasmine Shamma, Co-Investigators Professor Vicki Squire, and Professor Suzan Ilcan, and Postdoctoral Research Assistant Dr Helen Underhill.

US Embassy Grant

2018

Supporting "Network for New York School" Symposium (Beta)

Fellowship Role

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship

2020 - 2023

WIRL-Cofund Research Fellowship

2017 - 2019

Supporting "Voices from the Camps": Refugee Senses of Home book project Durham University, UK.

HD Fellowship in American and English Literature

2016 - 2017

Supporting work towards Joe Brainard's Art Beinecke Library Yale University, CT.

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