Biography: Professor Lienau is a scholar of comparative literature who uses creative combinations of languages—Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Indonesian, and Wolof—to uncover historical connections across Asia and Africa.  Her core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to framing national literatures in Asia and Africa through primarily European colonial influences. Across regions conjoined by Arabic, her work engages with languages and dialects of a broad geographical dispersion, framed through colonial archives in French, English, and translated Dutch texts.

Publications: Professor Lienau’s first book Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures (Princeton University Press, 2024) illuminates how writing of the late colonial period gave the Arabic language and script new meaning across imperial lines: no longer merely a religious, sacralized language, it became a counter-imperial medium. Through a large-scale historical reconstruction of connections across Asia and Africa—encompassing literary evidence from the 1820s through the end of the twentieth century—her book traces this common pattern with the rise and fall of European empires (in the Dutch East Indies, French West Africa, and Egypt under British occupation). Professor Lienau’s work has also appeared in the journals PMLA, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Current Research: Professor Lienau is currently at work on two new book projects: a literary history project that traces evolving ideas about sabotage and counter-revolution across imperial lines, and a project on contemporary literature after the rise of anti-authoritarian protest movements at the turn of the twenty-first century in Egypt and Indonesia.

Education: Professor Lienau has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Indonesia, Senegal, France, and the Netherlands. She completed her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at Yale University, through which she gained extensive training in Arabic, African Francophone, and Indonesian literatures. She earned a Certificate of Arabic Studies through the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo and was awarded an M.A. in French Studies from Middlebury College’s overseas language program. She pursued intensive language training in Wolof at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop’s Center for Applied Linguistics in Dakar during my doctoral degree.

Grants and Fellowships: Professor Lienau has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wellesley Newhouse Center for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was also the co-recipient of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant (on “Rethinking Global Paradigms of Political Economy and Culture”) with former colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a grant that was formative for my research. Her research overseas was supported by a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies, a Mellon International Research Fellowship sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, and by several competitive grants from Yale University. She was a past recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship for Cultures in Transnational Perspective from UCLA.