She received her PhD from Stony Brook University in 2013 where she won several awards for her scholarship, including an Andrew W. Mellon dissertation fellowship. Dr. Atik’s research interests include Victorian studies, Jewish literature, and Arab/Israeli literature. She gave a talk about Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns at the 2012 MLA national conference, and her article, “Calibrating the Female Body: Shame, Disgust, and the Recuperative Gaze in Amos Gitai's Kadosh,” was published in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, in 2014. She also works as an Assistant Editor for the peer reviewed and MLA indexed journal Victorian Literature and Culture.