Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Fellows

Meg Arenberg is a scholar of 20th and 21st-century African literatures with particular research interest in the intertextual relationships between Europhone and Afrophone African texts, literary translation, Kiswahili poetics, and digital media. Her current book project, Disruptive Forms: Tanzanian Literature Beyond Nation explores how literary forms and social relations collide and interact in the literary imaginations of Tanzanian poets, playwrights, and fiction writers. She has published English translations of Kiswahili poems by Kenyan poet Abdilatif Abdalla and Zanzibari poet Mohammed Ghassani, and is currently at work on a translation of Ali Hilal’s prize-winning novel Mmeza Fupa. Her work has been published in PMLA, Research in African Literatures, East African Literary and...

Habib Borjian is a linguist with expertise on historical linguistics, language documentation, philology, dialectology and Iranian languages and literatures. His academic training spans Columbia University, University of Tehran, and the State University of Yerevan. Dr. Borjian worked as a research scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University (2010-19). In the past nine years he has served on the board of directors of Endangered Language Alliance, aiming at documenting rare languages spoken by immigrant communities in Greater New York. Since 2012, he has also served as Co-director of the Near East region at the Endangered Languages Project, a joint project of Google and Univ. of Hawaii, in which his work entails identifying and categorizing the languages spoken in...