Najla Jarkas

Dr. Najla Jarkas is the Mellon Digital Liberal Arts Fellow and Chair of AMICAL’s Digital Liberal Arts Programs Committee, at the AMICAL Consortium. Previously she was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. She joined AUB in 2010 from Aleppo, Syria, where she served as Dean of Students Affairs and Academic Orientation at the Al-Shahba Private University (formerly Gulf University). From 2000-2008, she worked at the University of Sharjah (UAE) as Assistant Director of the English Intensive Program and Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English. She earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of Reading (UK) and her dissertation’s special focus was on the poetic sensibility of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956). At the American University of Beirut she taught Academic Writing & English Literature courses, introduced and taught Digital Humanities courses at the undergraduate level. Her recent research interests lie at the intersection of Writing Studies, English Literature, and Digital Humanities Pedagogy. She has offered a number of workshops on integrating digital methods and tools in Academic Writing and Literature courses in addition to integrating Digital Humanities projects in course design. She is currently leading an Orientalist Digital Humanities project, al-Iwan. She is the principal organiser of the biennial Digital Humanities Institute Beirut and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, Canada. She tweets @NajlaJarkas1 and can be reached by email at: njarkas@amicalnet.org