I am Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. I also serve as the editor of the journal Comparative Literature.

My research engages postcolonial theory, visual culture, and comparative media to explore the social and technological infrastructures that mediate aesthetic experience. I am the author of In the Shadow of World Literature (Princeton 2016), Cinema before the World (Fordham 2026), and co-editor with Zeina G. Halabi of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature. I am currently at work on a new book, How Language Became Data.

As a comparatist working in Francophone, Arabic, and Anglophone literatures, I am committed to understanding how languages and images construct and contest a sense of the world. At the heart of my scholarship is a belief in the humanities as a space for critical, creative, and transformative inquiry.