Dr. George Sadaka is an assistant professor of English literature. He also served as the associate chair of the then Department of English. He started his teaching career at LAU as an instructor in 2003 and as a lecturer in 2013. He taught creative writing, English literature and cultural studies. He was assigned coordinator of Cultural Studies, Ethics and English Literature between 2006 and 2019.

Dr. Sadaka earned his PhD in English from the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom in 2012, under the supervision of Dr. Lindsey Moore and the secondary supervision of Dr. Arthur Bradley. Dr. Robert Spencer, at the University of Manchester, examined the thesis and chaired the viva voce (defense). The title of the PhD thesis is “The Store as a Contra-Colonial Trope of Resistance and Decolonisation in a Selection of Twentieth Century Colonial Novels.” The thesis treats a reconciliation of colonial and postcolonial paradigms through recurrent images/colonial spaces located in 20th-century colonial novels: Heart of Darkness (1899-1902) by Joseph Conrad, Mister Johnson (1939) by Joyce Cary, The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Green, The sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles, The Grass in Singing (1950) by Doris Lessing, and Justine (1957) by Lawrence Durell. The methodology is a melange of Postcolonial, Marxist, and Deconstructionist literary theory.

Research Interests

Dr. Sadaka has research interests in the gothic, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism.  

SDGs Research Mapping

Dr. George Sadaka conducts research relevant to the following SDGs:

Publications

• (2023). “A Logos Masquerade: The Unity of Language and Woman’s Body in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Brontë Studies, 48: 3, 250-260.
• (2022). “Policing Victorian Women’s Desire: Retracing Mirrored Patriarchy in Jane Eyre and Villette.” Brontë Studies, 47: 2, 128-140.
• (2022). “Illnesses of Illusion and Disillusionment: From Euphoria to Aporia.” Life Writing, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2127627.
• (2019). “A Gothic Unconscious: Salisbury Cathedral as Metaphor and Symptom in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” English Studies. 100: 4, 407-421.
• (2017). “Islamic Multiculturalism: Co-existence Overcoming ‘Kufr’ in Tayeb Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North and Hanan El-Sheikh’s Beirut Blues. In Cordeiro Rodriques, L. and Simendic, eds., Philosophies of Multiculturalism Beyond Liberalism. London and New York: Routledge.

Dr. Sadaka has delivered the following lectures:

1. “The Scheherazade Paradigm (Word vs. Sword): A Dialectical Duality of the Semiotic and the Symbolic.” A lecture given at a symposium entitled The Power of Words, which I organized at LAU, in Spring 2015.
2. “(In)visible Borders: A (De)construction.” Presented at LAU to Architecture students within a symposium entitled Borders and hosted by the School of Architecture in Spring 2014.
3. “Occupied by Preoccupation: Monologue as Dialogue of Patience in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Martin Luther King’s The Trumpet of Conscience.” A presentation at Dialogue Under Occupation VI International Conference, Beirut, 2012.
4. “De-naissance: The Absent Male in Orientalist Paintings.” A brown-bag lecture at LAU in 2011.

Academic Degrees

• PhD in English Literature, 2012, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
• MA in English Literature, 2002, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
• BA in English Literature, 1999, University of Balamand, Lebanon