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Profiles of Doctorate Dissertations
Research Relevance and Potential Impact
This study contributes a vital angle to the ongoing debate about literary canonization in general and about
the American literary canon in particular. It is the first in-depth literary analysis of a significant corpus of
narratives by enslaved African American Muslims with a focus on the unavailability of respective texts in
established anthologies. Because of the marginalization of these texts, their impact is also missing from
considerations of American literary history. Ms. Al Badaai’s research situates five representative narratives
within the three commonly identified periods of the slave narrative genre, pre-antebellum, antebellum,
and post-bellum. Comparative studies of the selected texts with their anthologized counterparts by non-
Muslim narrators highlight similarities and differences concerning plot structure, motives, and language.
The dissertation emphasizes the multilingual nature of the American literary canon as well as of its socio-
historical contexts.
Relevant Publications
• Al-Badaai, Muna S., “Positioning the Testimony of Job Ben Solomon, An Enslaved African American
Muslim.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature IJALEL, vol. 4, no. 6, 2015, pp.
204-11.
Career Aspirations
I would like to do research and publish studies concerning the culture, heritage and traditions of the
Arabian Gulf.