Dr Charis Olszok
- Associate Professor in Modern Arabic Literature and Culture
Contact
About
Charis joined Cambridge in 2016 after completing her PhD at SOAS in the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, working on depictions of nonhuman animals in the Libyan novel. She also completed her MA at SOAS in Arabic Literature. Prior to that, she graduated from the University of Oxford, studying French and Arabic. Charis works on modern Arabic literature and has translated several novels and short stories into English.
Research
Charis works on modern Arabic literature, focussing on the depiction of nonhuman animals, spectrality, and environmental stress, and emphasising how authors draw past literary forms and epistemologies into their ecological visions. Her first focus was the Libyan novel, and the poetics of vulnerability that bind humans and nonhumans within it. Her more recent work explores comparative perspectives beyond the nation state, by way of pipelines, pollution events, trainlines, and extractive regimes. Her forthcoming monograph is titled Haunting Energies in the Arabic Novel: Oil, Ecology and the Spectral (Edinburgh University Press), with a companion volume to follow, suggesting the 1990s as a significant shift in ecological imaginings: Inflamed Ecologies in the Arabic Novel: Oil, Spectrality and the Gulf War. Her first monograph came out in 2020, The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability (EUP, 2020).
Teaching and supervision
My fourth year advanced literary Arabic course is themed around Animals and Nonhuman Creatures. I also teach second year intermediate literary Arabic, in which we look at a range of prose, poetry and theatre from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.