Sleiman el Haj, PhD.

Core Research team

Current role & background information

Dr. Sleiman El Hajj is assistant professor of Creative and Journalistic Writing in the Department of Communication, Arts and Languages (CAL) at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon (since 2018).

He is credited with restructuring the creative writing track in the BA English, and represents CAL on the Faculty Senate. In Trinity term 2019, Dr. El Hajj was appointed Visiting Research Fellow in the department of international development at the University of Oxford. Given the abundance of cultural ills that surround us – the corruption, insecurities, and hardships that undergird daily life in Lebanon – illness as a pedagogical and/or research-shaping trope in literary, cultural, and social studies is all the more pressing and pertinent, especially so in the aftermath of the August 4, 2020 explosion and its long-lasting impact on mental and physical health alike. In the absence of offerings in the LAU curriculum that foreground various iterations of illness, both cultural and somatic, and after discussions with colleagues in the medical school regarding developments in social and narrative medicine, El Hajj proposed and designed an interdisciplinary course in Illness Writing, which invites students to craft a spectrum of emotive narratives exploring the intersection between physical/medical and cultural/social ills. Dr. El Hajj has conducted qualitative narrative and life writing research in the Lebanese context, authoring over 10 peer-reviewed publications since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. El Hajj is the YEY project’s Qualitative Research Consultant, a role that involves analyzing the emotive diaries of Lebanon’s participating public high school students, who are receiving training in emotional intelligence. His book Illness Writing in Lebanon: Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives Since August 4, 2020 will be published by Routledge: Taylor & Francis in 2024.