Professor Zahia Smail Salhi is Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester since 2013 and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science at Sharjah University for the last three years. She specialises in Arabic literature, culture as well as women and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Her Keynote talk “Algeria and the Anxiety of Decolonisation: Case Studies in Language and Gender” takes us from the traumas of colonialism and the War of Independence to the challenges of decolonisation of both colonised and colonizer. She focuses in on questions of language and culture in newly independent Algeria, before moving on to her recent research into the role of women. Drawing on their historical legacy as resistance fighters, and Fanon’s work on the malleability of the veil, Zahia explores contemporary roles where women contest and affirm their place in the constantly shifting social environment of Algeria, via processes of ‘a quiet’ and ‘soft altering’ of social reality that subverts patriarchal power.