afikra Conversations: Author Shahd Alshammari

Join afikra as they interview academic, author & researcher of illness narratives and disability studies (and ALQ contributor) Shahd Alshammari on the afikra Conversations series.

Dr Shahd Alshammari is a Kuwaiti-Palestinian author and academic. She is the author of Head Above Water (Neem Tree Press, 2022). Alshammari teaches literature and has written numerous stories and creative nonfiction. Her research areas include illness narratives and disability studies. She is Assistant Professor of English at the Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait. She has authored an academic monograph, Literary Madness in British, Postcolonial, and Bedouin Women’s Writing (2016). Her collection of short stories Notes on the Flesh (2017) is a biomythography that deals with gender, race and disability in Kuwait. In 2019, she was nominated for the British Council Alumni Awards – Social Impact. In 2021 she won Outstanding Monograph of the Year from the National Communication Association’s (NAC).