I am associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University. My research explores the global entanglements of modern Arabic literature and modern Arab people. I have published two solo-authored academic books, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011) and Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance (Princeton, Sept. 2026). I am also an energetic co-editor, teacher, literary translator, and public commentator, as well as a co-founder of the membership organization Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

I started studying Arabic in 1997 as a PhD student in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Tracing Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare for my first book, I noticed that the version of Hamlet my Egyptian interlocutors remembered most vividly was a Soviet film, not a British play. That lightbulb moment led to a decades-long research project on the literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet ties, yielding the monograph Red Mecca as well as the co-edited anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (co-edited with historians Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova), a roundtable on Arab-Soviet ties, and various articles on topics such as the Cold War struggle over Tolstoy and “racist inclusion” in Soviet student dormitories. My interest in with Soviet-educated Arab writers also led to two book-length literary translation projects: Ice by Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, and The Russian Quarter by exiled Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez. The latter, forthcoming from Archipelago Books, is set in civil war Damascus and features a giraffe.

Research into one of the earliest Arab students in the Soviet Union, Palestinian ex-communist Najati Sidqi (1905-79), grew into an annotated translation of Sidqi’s memoir, a joint project with then-undergraduates Gideon Gordon and Anas Farhan. I am now writing a collective biography of Najati Sidqi, his Polish-born Jewish wife Lotka Lorberbaum Sidqi, and their eldest daughter Dawlieh Saadi, provisionally titled A Daughter Named Internationale: The True Story of an Impossible Palestinian Family. 

Meanwhile, an interest in playgoing has led me to write about the theatre of the Arab “spring,” the vagaries of Arabic plays for non-Arabic-speaking audiences, and related topics, and to translate several Arabic plays.

See my faculty profile at the Boston University Department of World Languages and Literatures. Download my CV. Email me at mlitvin [at] bu [dot] edu.