Visiting Assistant Professor Hanan Al-Alawi, who joined Gender and Women’s Studies in Fall 2024, is our March 2025 Faculty Focus! She is currently teaching GWS 101: Gender, Women, and Cultural Representation and GWS 345: Narrating Queer Lives.
Name: Dr. Hanan Al-Alawi 
Title: Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies
Hometown: Kuwait
Educational/professional background:
I have a BA in English, an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from Kuwait University, and a dual-title PhD in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University.
What is your field of research, and how did you get into it?
I’m a comparatist and a feminist scholar by training, where the interdisciplinary and intersectional study of literatures and cultures across languages, geographies and disciplinary boundaries truly excites me. My research is humanities-based, where I explore representations of the body in marginalized texts and visual art by women and queer, stateless, and Indigenous communities in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). I’m particularly interested in understanding how modern Arabic, Persian, and diasporic Anglophone literatures of West Asia–Arabian Peninsula and the Arabian/Persian Gulf–invent forms of embodied knowledge that reimagine subjectivity, national literary canons, and social justice discourse in the region. My interest in this field started at a very young age, where speaking Arabic (Kuwaiti dialect and Modern Standard Arabic), Persian, and English, opened up worlds of books, music, and art for me. My love for comparative literature stems from those rich formative encounters. The ethical imperative driving my work comes from an urgency to engage silenced stories– stories that bear witness to injustice and crack open different possibilities of life. Though my research explores how literature navigates oppression, I’m ultimately interested in how it is a site of fabulation, where alternative narratives of human and beyond human experience help us reimagine the world. I’m at my happiest when I see communities come together in solidarity to fight injustice through social mobilization, art, and literature.
What attracted you to UW-Madison?
The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UW-Madison is an amazing team. Faculty, students, and staff embody values of collaboration, mentorship, and caretaking in multiple spaces. GWS also gave me the unique opportunity to bring in my own research and teaching interests in gender and women’s studies beyond North America. It is rewarding to teach and write about Arabic and Persian literature and global Anglophone diasporic voices through intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks. The students at UW-Madison are truly impressive. They are intelligent and dedicated, with an unwavering belief that sociopolitical change, shaped by education and lived experience, reimagines structures of power.
What was your first visit to campus like?
I loved my first visit. It was the last day of a warm July and everyone was so kind and welcoming. The campus was quiet and serene and I remember being struck by its history, size, and location—especially the lakeside view and multiple libraries. Treading its new grounds had me thinking about how the complex history of the land, and how the stories of the countless people who have treaded it before me, have shaped the causes we fight for today.
Favorite place on campus?
The Botany Garden. The colorful greenery, fresh air, and bodies of water help me unwind. I especially love the gazebos where I have shared many a meal with wonderful people in the department.
Do you feel your work relates in any way to the Wisconsin Idea?
I think the Wisconsin Idea is at the core of everything I do. For me, aesthetics and politics, and theory and praxis are inseparable. I have an ethical stake in understanding the roots and legacies of power only to seek to dismantle its oppressive forms through education, grassroots organizing, and the arts. In my teaching, I center the role of channeling knowledge and lived experience into coalitional spaces of liberation and care beyond the classroom. If my students walk out of class with the knowledge and belief that they can transform the world into a more just place through any medium, including themselves as social agents, then my work has begun.
Hobbies/other interests:
I spend my time reading, making art, and watching independent films. I especially enjoy photography, writing poetry, and literary translation. I find traversing the boundaries of medium and language to be a compelling process that creates exhilerating meanings and ideas.