Salwa comes to us from Tunisia. She has worked and traveled back and forth between Tunisia and the United States for many years. At the University of Minnesota, she completed her graduate studies in English. After returning again to Tunisia and teaching English language and literature, she came back to the University of Minnesota to complete her doctoral program, specializing in representations of disability in post-colonial Arab and Islamic cultures and literatures. She returned once more to Tunisia and taught English again, but found herself missing her study of Arab and Islamic cultures and languages and wishing to teach Arabic language and literatures in English translation. She made the move again to return to the US and teach at the University of Minnesota. When the Arabic language, literatures and cultures position came open in our department, she joined us in pursuit of the opportunity to teach about Arab world literatures and cultures, including Tunisia. Once she is settled into the department with her teaching responsibilities here, she looks forward to returning to her study of representations of disability in post-colonial Arab and Islamic cultures and literatures. Specifically, she is very interested in including new films and other multimodal representations in her work.
Dr. Salwa Ben Zahra
