PhD Degree Awarded to Ms. Nuha Mohammed Abdullah Hamid in Arabic Literature and Criticism
Ms. Nuha Mohammed Abdullah Hamid was awarded a PhD degree in Arabic Language – Literature and Criticism for her dissertation titled: The Dialectic of Death and Life in the Poetry of Abdullah Al-Baradouni, which was submitted to the Department of Arabic, Faculty of Languages–Sana’a University. The dissertation defense was held on Tuesday, May 19, 2026.
The PhD Viva-Voce Committee, which was formed based on a resolution issued by the Graduate Studies and Scientific Research Council, consisted of the following:
| # | Committee Members | Designation | Position |
| 1 | Assoc. Prof. Adnan Yusuf Al-Shuaibi | Internal Examiner | Chair |
| 2 | Assoc. Prof. Ahmed Saleh Ahmed Ghazi | Main Supervisor | Member |
| 3 | Assoc. Prof. Najeeb Abdo Al-Wurafi | External Examiner | Member |
The dissertation aimed to:
- Explore the lexical and semantic components of the death-life duality in Al-Baradouni’s poetic collections.
- Analyze the artistic and aesthetic structures expressed through imagery, rhythm, and linguistic composition that embodied this existential conflict.
- Highlight Al-Baradouni’s philosophical distinctiveness in portraying death as a generative force of life.
The study yielded several key findings summarized as follows:
- The poetic structure of the analyzed texts is fundamentally based on the dialectic of death and life, where symbols of annihilation coexist with symbols of survival within a unified linguistic system.
- Death is portrayed not merely as an end, but as a condition for the existence and renewal of life, conveyed through linguistic mechanisms such as contrast, structural and rhythmic deviation, and semantic repetition.
- The dialectic of death and life reflects a profound existential experience closely connected to the poet’s biography and his political and social reality.
- Al-Baradouni’s poetry constitutes an open text with multiple interpretive possibilities due to the density of symbols and the diversity of linguistic and rhythmic structures.
In light of these findings, the researcher recommended the following:
- Expanding the methodological framework to include pragmatic approaches concerned with the impact of the text on the reader.
- Employing psychological approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the self/other and life/death dualities as manifestations of unconscious conflicts and archetypal symbols reproducing existential anxiety and alienation in the text.
- Developing a digital lexical database of death- and life-related vocabulary in Al-Baradouni’s poetry, classified according to semantic fields such as nature, the body, time, and weapons, to serve as a research tool for scholars.
The dissertation defense was attended by a number of academics, researchers, and specialists, students, colleagues, and the researcher’s family.
