Professor Lienau’s core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to the often binary (colonial/post-colonial) constructions used in more isolated studies of national literatures. Drawing on an extensive background in comparative Arabic, Indonesian, African, and Francophone writing, her research explores cultural and historical dynamics not fully explained by a single colonial legacy. Her work has been generously supported by national fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, and several competitive grants from Yale University. She was most recently the co-recipient of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her education includes a Ph.D. Yale University (Comparative Literature), 2011; Certificate of Arabic Studies, Center for Arabic Studies Abroad, American University in Cairo, 2007; M.A. Middlebury College (French), 2003; B.A. Wellesley College, 2002.

Professor Lienau's research fields include(Post)-Colonial Studies; Afro-Asian Comparatisms; African and Caribbean Francophone Literatures; Modern and Classical Arabic Literature; Egyptian Colloquial Literature; Indonesian Studies and Malay Language Literature; Senegalese Literature (Wolof); Transnationalism and World Literature. Her research languages include Arabic, Egyptian Colloquial, French, Bahasa Indonesia, Wolof.

Professor Lienau’s current book project, "Arabic and its Rivals: Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference, and the Politics of Post-Colonial Literature," engages with the political and cultural legacy of Arabic as a sacralized language, underscoring its changing symbolic value across the twentieth century in West African, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts.  The project considers the extent to which a common linguistic situation—the historical use of the Arabic script for vernacular languages, and the preservation of the Arabic language as a sacred, religious medium—has influenced the evolution of literatures in three national cases with distinct imperial legacies: Senegal, controlled by the French, Indonesia by the Dutch, and Egypt by the Ottoman Empire and subsequently by the British Empire. It examines how Arabic, as a sacred, religious medium, impacted the formation of national literatures in ways that contrast with vernacular, European literatures evolving from a Latin ecumenical context.  This project also traces the ways in which regions in West Africa and Southeast Asia, once culturally unified through the common use of the Arabic script, were later divided through the colonial introduction of European languages.

For a subsequent book project, Professor Lienau will be exploring materials on the cultural memory and literary traces of mass uprisings in Indonesia (1998) and Egypt (2011), assessing these major historical transitions alongside their joint implications for (post)-colonial studies towards the turn of the twenty first century.  An additional project in development compares the cultural legacies of internal colonization in the Indonesian archipelago and across the Egyptian/Sudanese borders, as informed by nineteenth and twentieth century histories of colonial and post-independence resource exploitation.

Professor Lienau's recent publications include “Vernacular Comparisons Beyond the Europhone (ACLA Forum),” Comparative Literature, June 2018 (70:2) – (Forum Guest Editor); “Re-Framing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene’s Translingual Legacies in French West Africa,” PMLA, March 2015 (130:2); “The Ideal of Casteless Language in Pramoedya's Arok Dedes,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Winter 2012 (32:3).

Professor Lienau is currently serving as an assistant editor of the journal boundary 2 and on the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee for 20th and 21st Century Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.