Biography

I'm Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, where I also serve as the editor of the journal Comparative Literature. My research and teaching explore the intersections of colonial and postcolonial studies, film and visual culture, and world literature, with a particular focus on Arabic, Francophone, and Anglophone literary traditions.

I was an undergraduate at Brown University, where I majored in Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Intellectual History. After graduating, I served for a year as a Presidential Intern at the American University in Cairo in the Center for Adult and Continuing Education and the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. The following year I began my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated with a designated emphasis in Film Studies. My dissertation was co-chaired by Judith Butler and Karl Britto and laid the foundation for my first book, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016), which was honored with the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book.

Currently, I have two forthcoming books: Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham University Press) and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature, co-edited with Zeina G. Halabi. These projects reflect my ongoing interest in the global circulation of media across and beyond the Arab world. I am in the process of writing How Language Became Data, a book investigating information systems in the Middle East (the telegraph, typewriter, radio, and telephone) and their implications for the study of world literature.

Over the years, I have held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. I have been grateful to share my research through lectures and conferences around the world—from Georgetown University in Qatar and the University of Minnesota to Dongguk University in South Korea and the University of Cape Town. For two summers, I served as the site director for the CLS Arabic program in Tangier, Morocco.

At the University of Oregon, I teach courses on topics such as visual culture, postcolonial theory, comparative media, and world cinema, and I have mentored graduate and undergraduate students across a range of disciplines. During my time in Oregon, I have served as the Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in Comparative Literature and the Director of Middle East and North African Studies.

Beyond teaching and research, I am the editor of Comparative Literature and committed to supporting academic publishing. I appreciate serving on editorial boards for a number of journals, including Comparative Literature Studies, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Philological Encounters, Journal of World Literature, Journal of Digital Islamicate Research, and Critical South Asian Studies.

As a comparatist, I draw primarily from English, French, and Arabic in my published work, and have studied Kiswahili, Spanish, and German. My research has been shaped by time spent living and working in Egypt, Morocco, Germany, Japan, and France—experiences that continue to inform my thinking about language, media, and global literary traditions.