Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2015 and an MA in Women’s Studies from Ohio State University in 2009. She is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press Feb 2023) and the poetry chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia (Finishing Line Press August 2024). Previously she was an associate professor of GWST at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (2015-2024) and fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2023-2024). Her current research concerns affect and embodiment in Palestinian resistance.

Prof. Shomali has published a number of peer reviewed essays on gender and sexuality in transnational Arab culture including: “Scheherazade and the Limits of Inclusive Politics in Arab American Literature” in Multi Ethnic Literatures of the US (also anthologized in Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal (eds. Cainkar, Joseph, & Suleiman Syracuse UP September 2021); “Political Social Movements: Homosexuality and Queer Movements” in The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures; and “Dancing Queens: Queer Desire in Golden Era Egyptian Cinema” in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. “Pulse of Queer Life” was published in Sajjilu Arab American: A SWANA Reader (eds. Cainkar, Jarmakani & Vinson Syracuse UP September 2022.

Prof. Shomali is working on a full length poetry volume. Her individual poems and creative pieces can be read or are forthcoming in Foglifter Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shade Journal, Tinderbox, Diode Press, The Pinch Journal, and Mizna, among others. For poems and essays, click here.

At Williams, Prof. Shomali teaches core courses in WGSS such as “Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” and two original courses: “Trans/National Femininities” and “Queer of Color Crit & Lit.”

Headline photo: El Seed mural at Wynwood walls, Miami, FL, March 2017.  Photo by MBS.