Heba Tebakhi is a Palestinian researcher and lecturer whose work focuses on Palestinian oral literature and prison literature. She holds a master’s degree in Arabic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, with a research focus on recent developments in Palestinian prison literature.

She previously worked as a research associate on PalREAD – Country of Words, an ERC-funded project at Freie Universität Berlin examining Palestinian literary production from the Nakba to the present. She also contributed to the Kalīla wa-Dimna project, working with selected Arabic manuscripts.

Alongside her research, she has taught at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Bayreuth and currently teaches at Freie Universität Berlin

Heba Tebakhi’s research examines the revival of the Ḥakawātī tradition in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. It focuses on how contemporary storytellers adapt oral narratives to changing social and political circumstances.

Drawing on interviews with storytellers and a corpus of oral narratives collected during her fieldwork, she traces changes in narrative themes, performance and transmission. She also examines how the social roles of storytelling vary across geographical settings. A central concern is how displacement, occupation and the genocide in Gaza have shaped both the tradition and the stories themselves.

Her wider research interests include Palestinian literature, cultural memory and the relationship between oral and written forms of literary expression.

First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gründler
Second supervisor: Dr. Montserrat Rabadán Carrascosa