Academic Bio
Stephanie Kraver received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023. She is a scholar of modern Arabic literature and Arabic and Hebrew poetry and poetics from the twentieth century to the present. Her research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of Palestinian/Israeli literature and film, constructions of memory after loss, anticolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies. At the University of Chicago, she served as a doctoral fellow in the Pozen Center for Human Rights and an affiliated fellow in the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her current book project identifies how poetic verse creates imaginative and political possibilities beyond the limits of ethno-national borders and separatist ideologies. The monograph tells the story of two poets: the celebrated Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish and the renowned Israeli writer and peace activist Dahlia Ravikovitch. By tracing their relationship and poetry over the course of two decades, the project locates the hopeful potential of poetry amid everyday violence and the politics of poetic form. Stephanie underscores acts of translation and transmission between the writers, as well as nodes of transnational solidarity, centering points of encounter and citation. She spotlights how Darwish and Ravikovitch use prolepsis, or a forward-facing gaze, to demand an alternative to the dislocation of Palestinians surrounding protracted warfare in the region.