I’m a Syrian-American writer, academic, translator, and poet. I work on conspiracy theories, and how they shape our relationship to knowledge, power, and each other.
My work is at the intersection of media, literature, and memory. While my dissertation (“One Thousand and One Nightmares”) focuses on conspiracies in the 20th-century Middle East, I have published on a variety of related topics: sex and technology, far-right radicalization on the Internet, science fiction in the Global South, critical museum praxis, receptions of Babylonian heritage, and more.
I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department in August 2025 and worked as a Research Associate for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC from 2023 to 2024. I am presently a Fellow with EUME and SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Germany. In the Fall of 2026 I will be joining Northwestern University in Qatar as a Global Postdoctoral Scholar with the Institute for Advanced Study of the Global South.
Democratizing knowledge is core to who I am. Though I invest considerable energy in producing public-facing essays and spearheading cultural projects, I believe the bulk of that work happens with students in the classroom. I have served as a literature and writing instructor at Columbia University for five years, and have received several awards for my teaching, including the Preceptor Teaching Award in Literature Humanities for the campus-wide Literature Humanities program and the Lead Teaching Fellowship for my Department. There is nothing I love more than watching the my students’ worlds expand in real time.
I am still building a portfolio of creative writing—much of my work has yet to see the light. I have been told my fiction and poetry is “grotesquely spiritual,” “unhinged and tragicomic,” and “tells history through epic cabaret.” Only time will tell if that holds up.
For several years I performed stand-up comedy in Berlin with Barra Talent. I no longer have the time for it, but I continue to consider myself a “meme lord,” and Internet humor animates much of my artistic style. Aside from my career, I love lifting weights, strolling graveyards, and cultivating rich gardens of friendship across America, Europe, and the Middle East.
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