Elkhansaa Meriem Zitouni

Meriem Zitouni is an MA student in Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She holds a BA in English Literature and Civilization from the University of Algiers II and a BA in Education and Teaching English as a Second Language from the Grand Teachers' School in Algiers.

Before returning to literary study, she spent five years in human rights work across North Africa and the SWANA region. She’s part of several regional civil society initiatives related to gender and intersectionality, with a focus on documentation and archiving. 

Her MA thesis examines child agency in contemporary Muslim diasporic memoir. It asks how literary form distributes innocence: who is written as a child allowed not to know, and who is presumed to have always known. She draws on childhood studies, alongside feminist, queer and decolonial theory.

Currently she is a Talent for Research trainee at MERLIT VUB.