Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar, BA (Oxon), PhD (New York University)

Profile

My research and teaching interests are in modern Middle Eastern literature, media, and translation; critical and legal theory; and histories of culture and technology in the Global South. I am particularly interested in South-South comparative methods, and in the intersections of literature, technology, and law.  

 My first book project, Translational Justice: Empire, Law, and the Arabic Literary Archive, argues that translation played a foundational role in the making, administration, and contestation of colonial law. It charts how translingual concepts of justice and reparation have been re/articulated across literatures and legal systems in the modern Middle East, and echo in settler-colonial contexts today. Recent publications address iterations of race in Arabic and Ottoman translations of Othello, materialist approaches to Arabic translation history, and the invention of the Arabic typewriter. A co-edited volume of translated sources in Arabic intellectual history titled Modern Arab Thought: A Reader is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. My second major research project, which I am pursuing with the help of a BA/Leverhulme research grant, concerns the unstudied global history of the Arabic typewriter.  

I completed my PhD at New York University in 2021, where I was a MacCracken Fellow, a Social Science Research Council Fellow, and a Carola Collier Berthelot Fellow. In 2025/6 I will be a Humboldt Research Fellow at EUME Berlin. 

Teaching

In 2025 I am convening the MA in Translation and Adaptation Studies as well as teaching Translation Studies II: Translation, Empire, and Law, and the Translation Studies Research Dissertation/Practice Project. I welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate research on modern Arabic and comparative literatures; the cultural and media history of the Middle East; and critical and translation theory.  

Research

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

2024                ‘On Translation and Being Just: The Arabic Novel and the British Archive.’ Comparative Literature, Vol 76, Issue 4, pp. 379-405. 

2023                ‘A Case of Multiple Identities: Uncanny Histories of the Arabic Typewriter.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 55, pp. 238-259. 

2020                ‘Loan-Words: Economy, Equivalence, and Debt in the Arabic Translation Debates’, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 57, Issue 2, pp. 187-209.

Winner: American Comparative Literature Association A. Owen Aldridge Prize

2017                ‘Nahḍa: Mapping a Keyword in Cultural Discourse’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Vol 37, pp. 50-84.

Refereed Chapters in Edited Volumes

2025               “Chapter One: Nahda” in Michael Allan and Zeina Halabi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming). 

2022              “Pour our Treasures into Foreign Laps: Race and Empire in Arabic and Ottoman Rewritings of Othello,” in Marilyn Booth and Claire Savina (eds.) Ottoman Translation: Circulating Texts from Bombay to Paris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 69-98. With Bridget Gill. 

2020                “Problems of Method: Applying ‘Western Literary Theory’ to Arabic Texts” in Lorraine Charles, Ilan Pappé, Monica Ronchi (eds.) Researching the Middle East: Cultural, Conceptual and Theoretical Issues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 181-194.

Review Articles

2024                “The Modern Arabic Bible: Translation, Dissemination and Literary Impact by Rana Issa” Middle Eastern Literatures Vol 26, Issue 2, pp. 264-266.

2023               “Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production and the State eds. Alexa Firat  and Shareah Taleghani,” Journal of Arabic Literature Vol 54, Issue 3-4, pp. 434-438. 

2023               “Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation by Rebecca C.   Johnson,” Comparative Literature Studies Vol 60, Issue 2, pp. 401-404. 

2020                “Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt by Samah Selim,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 52, Issue 3, pp. 567-569.

Translations

2018                ‘Amerchiche’ by Karima Nadir in Marrakech Noir (Akashic Books, Noir Series).