Deborah Starr
- Associate Professor
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Modern Arabic and Hebrew literature; critical theory; Middle Eastern film
Deborah Starr (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, 2000) is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature, and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her interests include contemporary Egyptian culture, Mizrahi literature and culture, minority communities of the Middle East, film, cosmopolitanism, and urban studies. She organized an interdisciplinary and pan-historical symposium entitled Cosmopolitan Alexandria held at Cornell in October 2002, and is editing the proceedings for publication. In her book (in progress), she explores how the tensions between cosmopolitanism and colonialism play out in contemporary literary, filmic, and television representations of Egypt of the first half of the 20th century.
