Dr. Diya Abdo is Associate Professor of English and current Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. A first-generation Palestinian, born and raised in Jordan, she received her B.A. in English Language and Literature (1996) from Yarmouk University in Jordan and her M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2005) from Drew University in New Jersey. Her Ph.D. dissertation, Double Agent: Fatima Mernissi’s Interventions in the Narratives of the Self, the Nation, and the Other, examines the textual and paratextual strategies of Islamic feminisms, with an emphasis on the Islamic feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi. Her dissertation won the university’s Mary Pennywitt Lester Dissertation Prize for “an outstanding dissertation written in English literature or modern history and literature.”
Diya has published papers in Life Writing, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Pacific Coast Philology, Image and Narrative, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Eugene O’Neill Review, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and MLA’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar, as well as anthologies on Anglophone Arab writers and women writers. Her research and scholarship center on Arab women writers, autobiography, Islamic feminism, comparative literature, and postcolonial translation, with a particular interest in Arab women writers’ narrative strategies, life writing, and the cross-cultural translation of autobiography.
Recently, Diya has published fiction in Journal: New Writing on Justice (her short story “The Love Hoard” is nominated for a Pushcart Prize), poetry in Storm Cellar, and creative non-fiction in Eno Publisher’s 27 Views of Greensboro and forthcoming in Bad Girls of the Arab World. Her short memoir “Bad Girl” won the Honorable Mention Award for Creative Nonfiction in the Center for Women Writers 2015 International Literary Awards. Her public essays, which have appeared in Jadaliyya, The Feminist Wire, and The Electronic Intifada, focus on the intersection between identity and vocation.
Diya is a passionate teacher and adviser. In 2008, after teaching in Jordan for several years, she took a tenure-track position at Guilford College. In April 2010, she was awarded Guilford’s “Dick Dyer Award for Outstanding Academic and Personal Advising,” in April 2012 was awarded Guilford College’s top teaching honor—the “Bruce B. Stewart Award for Teaching Excellence,” and in 2013 was awarded Guilford’s top advising honor—“Board of Visitors Award for Excellence in Academic Advising.”
Diya enjoys teaching composition, World Literature, Postcolonial Literature, American Literature, Arab Women Writers, and Arab and Islamic Feminisms. She also enjoys sharing her research and has presented at many national and international conferences and given public lectures at universities here and abroad. Most recently, Abdo founded the Every Campus A Refuge initiative, which advocates for housing Syrian refugee families on college and university campus grounds.