Mohammed Muharram: MSA Memory Scholars at Risk Fellow

After receiving his PhD in 2012 in Anglophone Postcolonial Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University (Hyderabad, India), Mohammed Muharram worked as an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Thamar University (Yemen), where he also chaired the English Department at the Faculty of Education and directed the Thamar University English Language Center for Translation and TOEFL Preparation. He taught widely in many public and private universities in Yemen. He received a Harvard Certificate for an online seminar on World Literature and obtained two Certificates from Arizona University in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) .
In 2019, Muharram escaped the war-torn Yemen to Jordan on a fellowship supported by Scholars Rescue Fund (SRF) of the International Institute of Education (IIE), New York, which enabled him to have a safe haven for teaching and research at Philadelphia University, Amman. In 2020, he was awarded the UKM Postdoctoral Fellowship in Malaysia under IIE-SRF sponsorship, but the fellowship was not taken due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. In 2021, Muharram was awarded the prestigious Philipp Schwartz Initiative Fellowship sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, where he is currently based.
“As my Philipp Schwartz Initiative Fellowship was coming to close, my colleague at the University of Bremen, Prof. Dr. Julia Borst knew that I was looking for a fellowship to continue my research, and she directed my attention to the MSA fellowship,” says Muharram. “I applied and got it, It was such a relief indeed.” Prof. Borst is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE at U Bremen; she is also the co-founder of the “Digital Diaspora” lab. My colleague and mentor, Prof. Dr. Norbert Schaffeld assisted me with ideas and recommendation letters.

One of the conditions for the MSA fellowship was to find a liaison scholar at an institution of higher education. “Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf, a professor of postcolonial and environmental studies at the University of Bremen, readily agreed to be my liaison scholar on a topic of our common interest in the emerging field of the Blue Humanities,” says Muharram.We are writing the essay “Navigating Waters of Memory in the Blue Humanities: Postcolonial Maritime Memory in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies”, The aim is to uncover the ways in which colonial histories and maritime experiences of memory intersect within the narratives. Through a close reading of the characters, settings, and themes, we will explore how the novels engage with memory, identity, and the complex legacies of colonialism in the maritime context, with a particular focus on the interdisciplinary perspectives of the Blue Humanities.

That co-authored essay is one of the many benefits of MSA fellowship. Muharram and Knopf are collaborating on another chapter entitled “Blue Postcolonialism” for the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities. “Thanks to the MSA fellowship and the efforts of Prof. Knopf, I became a founding member of the Bremen Blue Humanities Research Group (BBHRG) – with Prof. Knopf, Prof. Schaffeld, and Dr. Paula von Gleich,” adds Muharram. “We conducted a lecture series in the Blue Humanities which was inaugurated by the scholar who coined the term, namely Prof. Dr. Steve Mentz of St. John’s University, New York. I delivered a lecture on the maritime history of Yemen which is associated with the origin of the coffee that we drink everyday (Mocha is a Yemeni seaport famous for exporting coffee; hence Mocha Starbucks coffee”).

This liaison with Prof. Knopf has been expanded to include two scholars from Cardiff University in the UK, namely Prof. Martin Willis and Prof. Keir Waddington. Prof. Willis is Professor of English of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. He is also the Editor of the Journal of Literature and Science and former Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science (2015-18). Prof. Waddington is a Professor of history with more focus on interconnections between medical and environmental history, 1800 to the present. In association with the research group, Fiction Meets Science at the University of Bremen, the Bremen-Cardiff research group organized a Summer School in the Blue Humanities, and Muharram led a session on Arabic Blue Humanities with specific reference to Yemen. Both research groups are working on a joint project in the Blue Humanities, to be funded by the British government.
“Thus, the MSA fellowship has opened the way for me for more future collaborations that would hopefully secure a permanent job for me,” says Muharram.”I am enormously grateful to the MSA staff and to the funders, i.e. the Gerda Henkel Foundation which supports my current research on Yemen’s maritime historical relations across the Global South from a Blue Humanities perspective”.