About

Sleiman El Hajj

Associate Professor of Creative Writing

Dr. Sleiman El Hajj is an associate professor of creative writing in the Department of Communication, Arts and Languages (CAL) at LAU Beirut and represents the CAL Department in the Faculty Senate. In recognition of his work in Life Writing scholarship, Dr. El Hajj was awarded the Faculty Research Excellence Award 2022-2023.

Dr. El Hajj is credited with restructuring and redesigning the Creative Writing track in the BA English at LAU. Given the abundance of cultural ills – the corruption, insecurities and hardships that hinder daily life in Lebanon – illness as a research-shaping trope in literary, cultural and social studies is all the more pressing and pertinent, especially so in the aftermath of the August 4, 2020 explosion and its long-lasting impact on mental and physical health alike. In the absence of offerings in the LAU curriculum that foreground illness – both cultural and somatic – and in light of developments in narrative medicine and the medical humanities, Dr. El Hajj’s latest curricular development, after Life Writing, is an interdisciplinary course in Illness Writing, which invites students to craft a spectrum of narratives exploring the intersection between physical/medical and cultural/social ills.

El Hajj has conducted qualitative, life and illness writing and research in the Lebanese context, authoring over 15 publications in top-refereed journals since joining LAU in Fall 2018. He has been appointed to visiting research fellowships at the University of Oxford and is the editor of a topical volume of autobiographical, autoethnographic illness narratives, entitled Lebano-Pathography: Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives Since August 4, 2020 – a book-length intervention published in 2023 by Routledge, providing an analytical frame that combines medical pathologies with cultural practice through which illness narratives in Lebanon may be read.