Annette Damayanti Lienau is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University (2011). She is working on a book manuscript on language choice and ideology in the comparative literary histories of Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, based on materials in Arabic, French, Malay, and Wolof. Her current book project addresses questions of script change (from Arabic to romanized forms), the comparative legacies of devotional literature and sacralized language, and relationships between leftist transnationalism and vernacular print-culture. A portion of her research will be published in the forthcoming (Winter 2012) issue of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Early Career Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2010), the Social Science Research Council’s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2009), and Enders and Macmillan grants from Yale University (2008). As a graduate of the Middlebury Language School in France (M.A. 2003), the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad program at the American University in Cairo (2007), and as a former student of the Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, she is eager to advise students on language programs, international fellowships, and research projects overseas. She is also studying Persian, a language she hopes to incorporate into her teaching and research in the long-term. Annette’s teaching interests include: Modern Arabic Literature in Comparative Perspective, Comparative Literatures of the Indian Ocean, Cultural Studies and Leftist Transnationalism, Comparative “Third World” Cinema, Sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian literatures, and Comparative Slave Narratives.