Meet Our Team

Dr. Habiba Boumlik is a Professor at LaGuardia Community College. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology and M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Studies. She teaches Arabic and French language and literature, and linguistics. Her academic background and teaching experience include Arabic, French language and francophone cultures and literatures, Cultural Anthropology, Women Cross-Culturally, Middle Eastern History, and Arab Cinema. Her most recent publications include: “Female Activists in Tunisian Socio-Political Movements. The Case of Amira Yahyaoui” in E. Maestri and A. Profanter (eds.), Arab Women and the Media in Changing Landscapes. Springer (2017). Doris H. Gray and Habiba Boumlik. “Morocco’s Islamic Feminism. Contours of a New Theology?” in Gray and Sonneveld, eds., Gender, Laws, Social Change. Cambridge University Press (2018).

Lucy R. McNair is a translator and Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, The City University of New York, where she co-leads a faculty seminar on Language Across the Curriculum and co-curates the New York Forum of Amazigh Film. She holds a PhD. in Comparative Literature and a M.A. in Modern Languages. Her literary translations and scholarship focus on francophone North Africa and its diaspora, including Amazigh literature and film. Her literary translations include Mouloud Feraoun’s Algerian classic, The Poor Man’s Son (University of Virginia Press, 2005), Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh’s short story, “Taksiat,” (Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four, University of California Press, 2012), and poetry by Andrée Chedid, Venus Khoury-Ghata and Amina Said (The Poetry of Arab Women, Interlink Publishing Group, 2000). She contributed translations to SOUFFLES-ANFAS: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco during the Years of Lead (1966-1988), (Liverpool University Press, 2023). Her articles appear in Jaddaliyya, Language, Culture and Curriculum, and Journal of North African Studies.

Dr. Wafa Bahri received her PhD in Linguistics (Sociolinguistics) from The Graduate Center-CUNY and her MA in Applied Linguistics from the Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia.  She joined the faculty of the Modern Language Department at The University of Colorado Denver in 2020 where she teaches Linguistics Courses.  Her primary research focuses on the documentation and description of Tunisian Tamazight and the discursive display of Tamazight language and identity on Social Networking Sites (SNS). Her additional interests focus on language and gender, language and identity, and endangered languages. Her recent publication is a co-edited volume: Digital orality: vernacular writing in online spaces (Palgrave) and she has a forthcoming chapter on Amazigh activism in film.  She is also an editor of the Journal of Amazigh Studies (JAS) and a regular contributor to the Amazigh Voice newsletter. 

Dr. Yahya Laayouni is an Associate Professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the complexity of identity formation in “French” films of  children of North African origins living in France. He is interested in questions of religion, gender and sexuality in film. He is also interested in topics related to alterity and postcolonial subjectivity. A list of selected publication include, a recent article published on Jadaliyya  on Amazigh cinema, an article in the Journal of Religion and Film: "From Marseille to Mecca: Reconciling the Secular and the Religious in Le grand voyage (The Big Trip) (2004)," several several film reviews in The French Review  Journal such as "Nabil Ayouch's Muched Loved, Hicham Lasri's C'est eux les chiens, Boris Lojkin's Hope and Danielle Arbid's Peur de rien. He has also published a review of Maazouzi, Djemaa's book Le partage des mémoires: la guerre d’Algérie en littérature, au cinéma et sur le web. 

Caron Knauer has been teaching English at La Guardia Community College as an adjunct since 2001. She also teaches English to home care workers at 1199SEIU and at Local 1, in the plumbers apprenticeship program at Empire State College. As a development executive at Twentieth Century Fox, Caron served as associate producer of the hit movie, Waiting to Exhale (1995), an adaptation of Terry McMillan’s bestselling novel.  Many of her film reviews can be viewed on Educational Media Reviews Online (EMRO). Her book American Slavery on Film will be published in 2022 by ABC-CLIO in their Hollywood History series. As a literary agent, Caron sold Joseph Caldwell’s memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge, which Delphinium published in 2019. Kirkus called it “a simultaneously tragic and uplifting story of enduring love.” 

Kawtare Bihya is a New-York based community organizer and PhD candidate in sociology at UQAM. Interested in decolonial thoughts, her research focus on coloniality, decoloniality as well as the production of knowledge in postcolonial/post-independence societies. She is particularly interested in Amazighness and interethnic-relations in colonial nation-states. Her doctoral work analyses the new strategies developed by the millennial mothers in the Amazigh diaspora to ensure a certain cultural and linguistic transmission.

Mustapha Akhoullou holds an M.A holder in Cross-cultural and Literary Studies at the Faculty of Arts Sais, Fes City Morocco. He taught World Religions and Mythology as an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Arts Ibn Zohr Agadir City Morocco. He is also a translator (freelance) and a Poet. He is currently an adjunct professor (ESL department) at Hudson County Community College Jersey City NJ.