Dr Chana Morgenstern, Newnham
cm894@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures.
Her forthcoming book, Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print (EUP 2026), reconstructs a history of anticolonial literary and cultural collaborations between Palestinians and Arab Jews, from the heyday of decolonization in the 1950s to the present era.
Morgenstern is also co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.
To learn more about Hana's work, visit www.hanamorgenstern.com
Research Interests
Middle Eastern literatures; Arabic Literature; Palestinian literature; Hebrew and Jewish Literatures; Comparative literature; Anticolonial literatures and cultures; Global South Marxisms; Commitment literature; Literature and social movements; Aesthetics and politics; Intellectual histories of the Middle East; Histories and cultures of the Arab Left; Translation; Periodicals study; Feminist and queer theory; Anticolonial and postcolonial theory; Archival theory.
Research Initiatives and Projects
Co-director, Revolutionary Papers: An international research collaboration exploring the impact of 20th century anticolonial and postcolonial periodicals – including newspapers, cultural and literary journals, newsletters and ephemera – on literature, politics and society in the Global South. Features a teaching and research website, digital seminar, international conference and edited volume, with LSE and CHR, UWC, Cape Town.
Co-convener, Archives of the Disappeared: Discipline and Method Amidst Ruin: An interdisciplinary research initiative for the study and documentation of communities, social movements, spaces, lifeworlds, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence. Featuring monthly seminars.
Co-convener, Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance: International research initiative on the study of MENA literatures in the USA, MENA and abroad. Features a multi-year seminar and conference with Notre Dame University, Department of English.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Middle Eastern literatures; Arabic Literature; Palestinian literature; Hebrew and Jewish Literatures; Comparative literature; Anticolonial literatures and cultures; Periodicals study.
Selected Publications
Monograph
Morgenstern, Hana. Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026. Forthcoming
Anthology
Morgenstern, Hana, ed. A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026. Forthcoming (companion text to Cultural Co-resistance).
Morgenstern, Hana, ed. A Cultural Co-Resistance Reader: Palestinian and Arab Jewish Writing After 1948. Ayin Press. Forthcoming (North American edition of the companion text to Cultural Co-resistance).
Edited Volume
Morgenstern, Hana, and Mezna Qato, eds. The Arab Left Reader: Key Documents from Democratic Social, Cultural and Literary Movements in the Arab World. In progress.
Special Issue
Ahmad, Mahvish, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern, eds. “Revolutionary Papers: Anticolonial Periodicals from the Global South.” Radical History Review, no. 150 (October 2024): 1–238.
Articles
Ahmad, Mahvish, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern. “Revolutionary Papers: The Counterinstitutions, Counterpolitics, and Countercultures of Anticolonial Periodicals.” Radical History Review 2024, no. 150 (2024): 1–31.
Morgenstern, Hana. “A Savage Corpse: Colonialism, Anticolonialism and the Hebrew Modernist Avant Garde.” Modernism/Modernity 28, no. 4 (2021): 661–86.
Morgenstern, Hana. “The Storyteller: Arab Marxist Aesthetics in Ballas’s Narrative Tradition.” ha-Kivun Mizrah [Eastward] (Fall 2020).
Morgenstern, Hana. “What Is Anticolonial Translation? The Form and Content of Binational Resistance in Maktoob.” Journal of Levantine Studies, January 1, 2020.
Book chapters
Morgenstern, Hana. “Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism and Anti-Colonial Culture in the Israeli Communist Party (1940–1960).” In The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s, edited by Laure Guirguis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Morgenstern, Hana. “A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: Arab Socialist Realism and the Anticolonial Cultural Journal in the 1950s.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures, edited by Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Neelam Srivastava, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and Jack Webb. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
Essays
Morgenstern, Hana. “Our History Is Our Mandate.” Allegra Lab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism (blog), 2023. https://allegralaboratory.net/our-history-is-our-mandate/
Morgenstern, Hana. “An Archive of Literary Reconstruction after the Palestinian Nakba.” Middle East Report 49, no. 291 (2019).
Pedagogical resources
Morgenstern, Hana. “Teaching Tool: An Archive of Literary Reconstruction in al-Jadid.” Revolutionary Papers. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://revolutionarypapers.org/teaching-tool/an-archive-of-literary-reconstruction-in-al-jadid/.
