Eylaf Bader Eddin Assistant Professor of Arab Studies

Integrating academic knowledge into practices of everyday life has become the focus of my academic career, ever since I enrolled in the Master's program in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 8. This interest stemmed from a desire to understand the simple yet profound meanings behind the slogans used in the Arab revolutions of 2011. The cultural aspects of our daily lives can either facilitate or hinder communication across cultures and languages. And our understanding of these aspects tends to shift when they are transferred to different geographic locations and spoken in different languages as my Ph.D. researched the translation of the language of the Syrian revolution in Universities of Marburg (Germany) and Aix-Marseille (France).

Thus, my academic research and teaching positions aim to serve to study and teach about those realms in different languages and with and without translation. Publishing my first book in Arabic, "When They Cried out 'Forever': The Language of the Syrian Revolution" (Mamduh Adwan 2018), after receiving Sadiq Jalal al-Azim Award for cultural research, was my initial attempt to avoid secluding academic knowledge only for academics and academic spheres. Instead, I wanted to emphasize the importance of knowledge production in Arabic in order to activate our roles as academic in communicating with a language that is accessible to our research participants. Furthermore, I make it as a commitment to publish the majority of my research in Arabic, English, and French across various media and academic outlets, in order to maintain this ongoing mutual dialogue. This was accompanied by the publication of an open-access book, "Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution (2011'12)" (De Gruyter, 2023), to ensure that the knowledge I produce can be freely accessed by all. 

Delving into a new and intriguing area of research, I'm now investigating the musical practices of former political prisoners in Syrian prisons in exile, both in their former prisons and in their exiles, as modes of resilience and resistance in their new shape of prisons; exile. After three years of fieldwork, this project is intended to take place right here at Davidson, with all its artistic outputs - songs, exhibitions, and live performances - actively involving our students from across the college. Following this approach, I encourage my students at Davidson to engage directly with active agents from the Arab world - journalists, publishers, filmmakers, activists, and intellectuals. By accessing Arab media and academic outlets, they can enhance this cross-cultural communication and contribute to their own professional development in meaningful ways.