Public-facing essays

“Demagogy or Pedagogy? A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus.” Inside Higher Ed, January 2025. This essay began as part of a Boston University Zoom panel on “Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Is Not, and What To Do”; watch that video here. See more on this topic by my colleagues and me on the Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff website. See my short videos here and here.

“The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part III.” My notes on Khalil Alrez’s novel The Russian Quarter, which I’m translating for Archipelago as The Sleepless Giraffe of Damascus. Asymptote, June 5, 2023.

An Ex-Soviet Jew Looks at Syrian Refugees and America Marginalia Review of Books, 2015.

“Between Love and Justice: Teaching Literary Translation at Boston University” Asymptote, 2014.

“Not Dead Yet,” Cairo dispatch on n+1, June 21, 2012.

Podcasts and interviews

“From Issues to Action” podcast. BU colleague Phillipe Copeland interviews Conference on the Jewish Left founder Jeremy Menchik and me about our efforts to help education leaders understand the distinction between Jewish identity and pro-Israeli-government political views, July 2026. Part of my work with Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

Boston University MFA graduate Ibrahim Fawzy interviews me on the New Books Network podcast about my co-translation, Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi, January 2026.

“Transnationalism and Translation.” Yasmeen Hanoosh interviews me on the “Between Two Arabic Translators” series, Arablit, September 2025.

Profile of me by Roni Lakin, “Humanists at Work,” BU Center for the Humanities, March 2025. Among other things, a sneak peek at my new book:

Arabic study abroad novels set in Europe “usually feature a man going from, let’s say, Lebanon or Egypt, to London or Paris, and meeting some kind of Susie or Katie who embodies the host culture and all of its virtues. She’s beautiful, liberated, freethinking, sexually available. It’s great, but she’s morally vacuous,” notes Litvin. “Travelers to Russia and then the Soviet Union tell a different story. The Russian woman is deep. She is spiritual.”

The Russian woman in Arabic literature becomes an extension of 19th century Russian literary rhetoric about women, acting as a moral sustainer of society. If Western women are shallow—and men can’t get it together—Russian women offer a sort of perfection. However, there’s a catch.

“You can’t ever really have her,” Litvin says. “She becomes a figure for Soviet internationalism. It’s the Soviet Union, the dream of communism itself that is ultimately so perfect and so unavailable.”

Tugrul Mende interviews Masha Kirasirova, Eileen Kane, and me on New Books Network about Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, March 2024.

Jadaliyya’s New Texts Out Now interviews my co-editors and me about Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, October 2023.

BBC Arabic interviews me on Chekhov adaptations in Arabic, 2022 (video; in Arabic)

“Sonallah Ibrahim’s Moscow.” Interview by Tugrul Mende about my translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Ice. ArabLit, January 31, 2022.

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research in Berlin: short interview with me about my Arab-Russian/Arab-Soviet project published. “I want to see more rising scholars with large and diverse language sets and really transnational interests – 5in10 with Margaret Litvin”

Interview: “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: The Bilingual Course, Backwards” (ArabLit, 2018).

Interview on Pod Academy: a half-hour podcast about my work with Tanjil Rashid. September 13, 2012.

Dec 12, 2011. Q&A in BU Today online magazine: http://www.bu.edu/today/2011/cairo-up-close-and-personal/

Nov 24, 2011, 10:30pm. Interview with Motaz Elagamy on the “Panorama of the Theatre” program on Egyptian state radio.  Didn’t get a recording.  It was a little iffy at the Maspero building that night.

More media

Adam Nossiter quotes me in his New York Times obituary for Sonallah Ibrahim, August 21, 2025.

Nora Berman quotes me in The Forward: “Zohran Mamdani is right about what ‘intifada’ means — well, kind of,” June 18, 2025.

Margaret Litvin Wins PEN/Heim to Translate Khalil Alrez’s Russian Quarter. ArabLit, Nov 17, 2022. Excerpt from the novel here. (Yes, the protagonist is a giraffe.)

Coverage of Rebecca Maggor’s production of my translation of Mamduh Adwan’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late, Cornell University, 2017.

A San Francisco Hamlet production inspired by Hamlet’s Arab Journey. SFGate, November 13, 2017.

Rich Barlow, Two CAS Professors Win Respected Fellowships, BU Today, March 26, 2015.

هاملت العربي في… الزعتري؟!  Al-Hayat article by Samir Frangie on Hamlet’s Arab Journey and the future of Arab cultural studies (in Arabic). April 27, 2014.

Susan Seligson, “New Middle East-North Africa Major Fills Gap at CAS,” On the Middle East and North Africa Studies program I founded. BU Today, May 6, 2014.

December 8, 2011. Writeup by Ibrahim Ouf in Al-Messa (المساء) newspaper, part of the Egyptian state-owned Gumhuriyya conglomerate.

Dec 4, 2011. The Guardian/Observer mentions Hamlet’s Arab Journey as an “inspired” study and “quirky” Christmas gift.

Nov 26, 2011. Profile by Daniele Raineri (in Italian) in the Rome-based daily Il Foglio.

Winter 2009. “Hamlet of Arabia,” a profile of me by Bari Walsh in Bostonia magazine. Thanks to Vernon Doucette for the awesome photo shoot with the genuine human skull, borrowed from the BU College of Fine Arts!