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Brooke Comer

Brief Biography

Brooke Comer’s research writing courses involve civic engagement and focus on social justice issues. She is responsible for designing and implementing numerous Community Based Learning courses in which AUC students engage with and analyze the relationship between marginalized people and the problematized landscapes they inhabit.In Spring, 2016 with Psychology Professor Dr. Andrea Emanuel, she launched the Tolerance Project, bringing students together with African Refugee students and local Egyptian children who routinely harass them, to promote mutual tolerance and acceptance of “the other.” Her student writing has been published in VOICES IN REFUGE (AUC Press, 2009), a collection of creative nonfiction, real-life stories of African refugees in exile. Her students also produced EL KOBRI, an online student magazine used as a forum for dialogue between students at Duke University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, institutions that still engage in collaborative classes. Brooke is the Duke Engage liaison in Egypt, coordinating CBL opportunities for  mixed groups of Duke and AUC students. In addition to her teaching, Brooke serves as a philanthropist and an advocate for marginalized youth, enabling bright, economically challenged children to attend boarding school and universities. The writing workshops she organized in 2005for refugee women has continued over the years and resulted in a collection of fiction and creative nonfiction.  Three teenagers from her original class completed MFA and PhD programs, and her work with them inspired her paper, Transporting Identity and Negotiating Selfhood in Asylum, presented at Heritages of Migration, in Buenos Aires in April, 2017. She was appointed to her post in January 2005 and the focus of her research is social justice, including imagination as a transcendent power in the lives of marginalized youth in Cairo and the impact of gender identity on the success with which young female refugees adjust and succeed in asylum and resettlement.

Brooke Comer served as an interim instructor at the University of Southern California. She holds a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MA from New York University.

Research Interest
  • Africa
  • Problematized Landscapes and Marginalized Inhabitants
  • The Problem of U.S. Aid in the Third World
  • Life Story Writing
  • Children’s Rights
  • Education, Empowerment of Marginalized People through Creative Arts

Brooke is the co-editor of VOICES IN REFUGE (American University Press, 2009), “When Reality Meets Reality: Why Iraqi’s Love Reality TV,” (Oxford University Press, 2007), author of “Ali Salem’s Neighborhood,” (Book Forum, 2003) and “Life and Death in Bab-el-Louq,” (Massachusetts Review 2002). She has also written more than 300 articles for the consumer and trade press.