Kamal Abou Mikhael

Kamal Abou Mikhael, born in Lebanon, lived in Greater New Orleans (Kenner) from 1989 to 2003, where he was introduced to African American culture and language, and earned a BS in Computer Science at the University of New Orleans. While completing a computational-linguistic thesis for an MS in Computer Science from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Kamal learned about linguistics as an academic field.

A journey of personal study and research in linguistics was followed by an MA in English Language where he carried out corpus linguistic research in metaphor. Here at the University of British Columbia, he is embarking on corpus-linguistic research in African American literature through a cognitive linguistic lens that explores the role of metaphoric constructions in the evolution of the African American literary voice. Kamal's methodology naturally integrates the literacies and tendencies from my previous academic background, and explores aspects of my lived experience to bring to light what is lurking in textual data.