Dr Shamma is a specialist in 20th-21st century literatures. Her research tends to focus on the poetry of place, and ranges across regions in its focus-from New York City, to refugee camps. She has published on topics including The New York School, Eco-criticism, Caribbean poetry, Women's poetry, and Testimonies of Migration, and authors including Frank O'Hara, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, T.S. Eliot, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior. She is interested in what Wallace Stevens calls, "the pressures of the contemporaneous" and how these pressures influence perceptions, and by extension, literary forms.

She is currently Principal Investigator on the British Academy funded 'Lost and Found: Testimonies of Displacement, Migration, and Resettlement' project, creating the digital archive: Making Home Away (www.makinghomeaway.com). Her current book projects both incorporate interview material into their texts: We are The New York School (under contract with Edinburgh University Press), and When We Talk About Home: Testimony, Oral History, and Poetry of Migration, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-2022).