Layal Ftouni

Layal Ftouni is currently in the final stages of her doctoral thesis at the University of Westminster where she was awarded a CREAM scholarship. She is also a visiting lecturer at the same university and SOAS, London. Her research, titled Dismantling or Reproducing the Orientalist Canon? examines Neo-Orientalism in contemporary visual arts.

Layal’s areas of interest include the poetics and politics of representing gender, race and culture through art; contemporary art from the Middle East and globalisation; and feminist critical theory. She has recently presented her research in a number of different forums including, The Courtauld institute of Art, Ruskin School of Art -University of Oxford, and the University of Copenhagen. Layal has written a chapter entitled ‘Rethinking Gender Studies: Towards an Arab Feminist Epistemology’ published in Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (2011) and co-edited Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice (2016) with Tarik Sabry (I.B. Tauris).