Isabelle Felenda

Isabelle Felenda studied Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. She completed her studies with a master's thesis in Arabic Studies on the function of weather descriptions in pre-Islamic poetry, and a second master's thesis in Comparative Literature on the technique of intergeneric weaving of different literary traditions in the poem Night Strings (Watariyyāt Layliyya) by Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb.

Since 2018, she has taught courses in Arabic and Hebrew language and literature in Berlin, worked as a translator and interpreter for academic, artistic, and humanitarian projects, and assisted film production companies with research.

Since August 2024, she has been pursuing her PhD at Philipps University Marburg as a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), focusing on the Iraqi poet Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb.

Despite his enduring popularity since the 1950s, the Iraqi poet Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb (1931/4–2022) has rarely been the subject of scholarly research. The gap between his limited reception in academic circles and his widespread fame across the Arab world has slightly diminished in recent years, yet remains striking, particularly in light of the large audiences at his public readings. One reason for the lack of comprehensive studies lies in the fact that al-Nawwāb published only a small portion of his poetry in written form during his lifetime. Instead, he used oral performance as the primary medium for his work, with many poems being repeatedly and almost entirely rewritten over time. As a result, the full scope of his oeuvre can today only be approximated through audio and video recordings.

Against this backdrop, the dissertation project is first tasked with reconstructing its source material from audiovisual recordings circulating on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and various blogs, as well as from poems committed to memory within the poet’s milieu and later transcribed in newspaper articles, memoirs, and interviews.

The resulting corpus will be examined, on the one hand, for al-Nawwāb’s characteristic references to figures and literary genres from Arab history. Since the lyrical subject often presents itself as a Qarmatian, and historical events are reconfigured to reflect both the present and an imagined future, the analysis must explore how early Islamic divisions, Sufi metaphor and doctrine, Marxist theory, and Ismaili cosmology are interconnected and reinterpreted in the texts.

On the other hand, the nature of the corpus necessitates a focus on performance itself—a mode of presentation that, through its ties to other performative contexts and the poet’s deliberate fusion of poetry and music, frequently pushes the boundaries of the core literary concept of “text.”

In addition to situating the corpus within the poet’s biography and the political events reflected and negotiated in the poems, the study will also contextualize it within an international, Marxist-influenced literary movement driven by the belief in literature’s didactic power to effect social change.