Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Maru Pabón received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a certificate of concentration in Middle East Studies. In 2024, she joined the department of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies.
She is a scholar of literary modernity in the Arab world and Latin America, with a particular focus on twentieth-century poetic movements across the Levant, Caribbean, and North Africa. Her research interests include the history of Arabic poetry, comparative poetics, Marxism and Marxist aesthetics, anticolonial literature and thought, and the theory and practice of translation. Her current book project, Third-Worldist Poetics, examines efforts to construct the “voice of the people” across Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian poetry throughout the long 60s. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America (Brill, 2025).
Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, CAORC (the Council of American Overseas Research Centers), PARC (the Palestinian American Research Center), and AIMS (the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies).
Her academic publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She has also contributed essays to venues like Frieze, Ibraaz, Bidoun, and various exhibition catalogues. She is currently a Book Review Editor for IJMES (the International Journal of Middle East Studies) and a co-organizer of the Cultures of World Socialism working group.
