Tasneem Yousef (PhD Candidate)
Thesis title: Palestine Is a Futurism: Affect, Poetics, and Politics of the Palestinian Speculative
PhD supervisors:
Background
Tasneem Yousef is a PhD researcher based in the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Edinburgh, where she is working on the poetics, potentialities, and affect of Palestinian speculative writing. She completed her MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of York, where she wrote her dissertation on bewilderment as a poetics and affect in the poetry of Kaveh Akbar. She is mainly interested in contemporary poetry and poetics, affect theory, form and genre, and writing from Arab and SWANA diasporas. Outside of academia, she is a writer, editor, and educator, and she was recently an inaugural writer-in-residence at the Mary Ratcliffe Writer's Room in Edinburgh. Her writing can be found in Poetry Online, VIBE, BAHR Magazine, and elsewhere.
Qualifications
- MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture (Distinction), University of York
- BA English Literature and Linguistics (Minor in French), Qatar University
Responsibilities & affiliations
- Postgraduate Research Representative for IMES
Research summary
Tasneem's current research sits at the intersection of Palestinian literary studies, affect theory, and speculative writing theory, focussing on the emergence of the Palestinian speculative as a subgenre across the diaspora as a way of addressing questions about Palestinian history, identity, and futurity against the impasse and fragmentation of the contemporary Palestinian political moment. Through the use of affect theory as a framework, the project considers the use of the speculative in Palestinian writing as it manifests across different affective modes. This is not for the purposes of taxonomy, but simply to allow us to think about the different affective investments and movements that are at play in conversations about Palestinian futurity. This project aims to explain why and how Palestinian writers use the speculative to confront their own specific political conditions of occupation. Through situating and analysing these texts, the project attempts to consider what a speculative Palestinian poetics might offer in this particular moment of revolutionary agitation.
Current research interests
Literatures of the SWANA region and its diaspora - Palestinian literature - Affect theory - Contemporary literature, particularly contemporary anglophone poetry - Poetics, form, and genre - Postcolonial and decolonial theory - Modernism and PostmodernismConference details
- Forthcoming (April 2026): ““Measures, Precautions, Requirements, and Rules”: Intergenerational Pedagogy and Repair in Wisam Rafeedie’s The Trinity of Fundamentals," Literature, Care, and the Ethics of Living in SWANA, Utrecht University
- April 2023: “Uncertain Visitations from the Past, Ever-New Creations of Our Brain: The Question of Genre in Etel Adnan’s In The Heart of the Heart of Another Country," World Congress on Undergraduate Research, University of Warwick