Aya Labanieh is a Syrian-American writer, translator, academic, and aspiring stand-up comedian. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department, and currently serves as Research Associate of Community Engagement at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art.

Her dissertation focuses on imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy theory afterlives in postcolonial Middle Eastern literature and media. Her other publications have engaged with a wide variety of related topics: Arabic science fiction, translation in settler-colonial contexts, comedic contestations of modernity, ancient Babylonian receptions in Arabic literature, decolonial museum praxis, and Internet subcultures of conspiracy theory and far-right radicalization.

Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and edited volumes Global Science Fiction, MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh, and Routledge’s Teaching About the Ancient World in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice. Her public-facing writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon magazine, Ancient Exchanges, Culturico and Politics/Letters.

Moreover, she is deeply invested in the public humanities, and has led multiple projects to bridge the gaps between academia, literature, and local communities. Her most recent project was in collaboration with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany titled, “GATE: From Babylon to Berlin” (2023), which invited migrant Middle Eastern artists to reflect on their connections to the ancient Babylonian past under the Ishtar Gate, through original poetry and musical performances.

She serves as a Public Humanities Fellow on the “Speaking with Spirituality” podcasting project, which documents the histories of feminist and queer activism in Black Harlem churches (2021-2024), and was a Fellow and Assistant Curator for the Zip Code Memory Project (2021-2022) and its Imagine Repair Exhibition (2022), which was dedicated to memorializing the disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on black and brown neighborhoods in the Harlem, Washington Heights, and the South Bronx.

Aya has served as writing instructor at Columbia University and a TA at both Columbia and Barnard, and she has been awarded the Lead Teaching Fellowship by the Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She will join the cohort of Literary Humanities Core Preceptors in Fall 2024.

Research Interests: Conspiracy Theory and Conspiracy Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Counter-Discourse, Comedy, Secularisms and Modernities, Middle Eastern Literature and Politics, Critical Museology, Public Humanities, Alt-Right Internet Subcultures