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 and poetics, Marxism and Marxist aesthetics, literary dialects and creoles, Third-Worldist literature and thought, Arab diasporic literature from the Americas, and the theory and practice of translation. Her current book project 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 research has appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She has also contributed essays and translations to venues like Bidoun, Momus, and Bidayat. She is currently a Book Editor at IJMES (the International Journal of Middle East Studies) and a member of the Cultures of World Socialism working group.
