Presented by Comparative Literature & Literary Theory’s Theorizing Series 2025–26

The Theorizing Lecture Series of the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program invite you to join us for a reading and conversation featuring Dr. Karim Mattar (University of Colorado, Boulder) whose work weaves together first- and third-person forms, family history, and political analysis to grapple with the ethnic cleansing of Yafa, Palestine in 1948.

Co-sponsored by the Wolf Humanities Center and the Department of English.

Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education.  He is currently at work on two book projects.  The Ethics of Affiliation: Palestine and the Future of Humanism seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law.  Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generations interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine, with a special emphasis on American higher education during the genocide.  Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for the liberation of Palestine.  Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.