Narrative poem. “City Laments,” in the poetry anthology Born in Babylon: Middle Eastern Poetry on Diaspora and Antiquity. Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming.
Author: sophushelle
Collaborator Literature
Collaborator Literature: Ghassan Kanafani, Cold War Politics, and the Dark Underbelly of Resistance. Under review.
Journal article. Emerged from the third chapter of my dissertation, which I defended at Columbia University in August 2025.
Treachery and Translation
“Treachery and Translation: The Allegiances of the Hebrew Language and Jewish Identity in Emile Habibi’s Palestine and al-Tahir Wattar’s Algeria,” Poetics Today, forthcoming.
In fraught settler-colonial contexts, cultural and linguistic encounters across ethnic, religious, and political battle-lines can often be construed as betrayals of the nationalist struggle. To the Arabs of Palestine after 1967 and Algeria after independence in 1962, the Hebrew language (and the Jewish communities it represented) increasingly became a source of suspicion through its association with French and Israeli colonial power. In this article, I analyze two Arabic novels published in 1974—Emile Habibyi’s The Pessoptimist and al-Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake—whose contents, contexts, and afterlives contend with themes of treachery and fidelity, both linguistic and political. The Arab protagonists of both novels are lifelong traitors who collaborated with the French or Zionist occupiers, and their relationships to the Hebrew language and Jewish identity are mediated by proximity to occupation. Likewise, the authors, Habiby and Wattar, were preoccupied with betrayal their entire careers—either being accused of it themselves, or accusing it of others—because of the struggle over language and political power in the settler-colony. By analyzing treachery in the lives and literatures of these authors, I show how Jewish identity becomes a “third variable” in a binary settler-colonial struggle, rendering various forms of translation, solidarity, and hybridity across Arab and Jewish publics untenable.
Born in Babylon
Poetry anthology with Sophus Helle (eds.), Born in Babylon: Middle Eastern Poetry on Diaspora and Antiquity. Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming.
Born in Babylon is a multilingual poetry anthology that gathers personal and political reflections on exile, migration, loss, and transformation by ancient and modern poets from the Middle East. The poems in the volume set up a dialogue between the deep past and the troubled present, criss-crossing the rich archive of exilic stories from the ancient Near East with the voices of modern poets from the region, all of whom grapple with the same forms of upheaval, grief, culture shock, and nostalgia. The volume consists of English translations of original poems in Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, and Kurdish, as well as translations from ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Demotic Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. By staging such an unlikely and experimental dialogue across millennia, Born in Babylon pushes against purist notions of “roots” or “origins,” highlighting instead how movement, translation, and cultural hybridity are the oldest forms of human identity, belonging, and connection.
The anthology consciously brings together migrant experiences and languages that are often separated by colonial legacies, national borders, sectarian divides, and, to put it simply, thousands of years. We hope such an ambitious text can offer a new vision for the rich, multi-ethnic, postcolonial, and polyphonic future(s) of the West and East alike.
Aside from serving as co-editor of the volume, I wrote the Introductory essay and produced the Arabic translations for the poems of Amal al-Jubouri, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Liwaa Yazji, Ghareeb Iskander, and Widad Nabi. I also assisted in the Hebrew and Kurdish translations of works by Abdulkadir Musa and Mati Shemoelof.
One Thousand and One Nightmares
Monograph still in progress. Based on my dissertation “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Literature and Media,” which I defended at Columbia University in August 2025.
One Thousand and One Nightmares sets out to answer a regional question that is now being asked around the globe: why are conspiracy theories so prevalent in the culture and politics of the Middle East? What role does conspiracy perform in relation to crisis, and how does it transform in dialogue with local and global shifts in power? My project charts a pre-digital cultural history of conspiracy and develops an interdisciplinary method for the study of conspiracy tropes in twentieth-century Middle Eastern literature and media. I analyze real conspiracies that took place in the region at the hands of colonial regimes or local autocrats as well as what I call the media afterlives of these conspiracies: the tropes, narratives, and fictions produced by journalists, writers, and artists in the cultural sphere to make sense of diffuse power networks and backroom geopolitics. The book tells an overarching story about how conspiracy becomes an increasingly totalizing and intimate framework for theorizing politics’ relationship to society—a seismograph for radical shifts in governing power structures and conceptions of the collective. The conspirator is at first a foreign colonial power, but moves ever inward in the public imagination: towards scheming minorities who are “fifth columns” within the newly independent nation; Cold-War-era collaborators who turn against their own communities for personal gain; and lastly, in the transition to the autocratic security state, the conspirator could be just about anyone: one’s colleague, neighbor, or child.
Gilgamesh and Postcolonial Pedagogy
“Gilgamesh and Postcolonial Pedagogy,” Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh, edited by David Damrosch and Sophus Helle. New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming.
The long literary history of Gilgamesh is inextricable from the history of empire. The epic itself condemns its main character for the imperial nature of the quest that he launches against Humbaba, and the violence he wreaks on the territory that he conquers: as the gods pour scorn on his seemingly triumphant deeds, the reader is left to question the value of imperial expansion. The epic survives in a series of manuscripts kept at Nineveh, the capital of the mighty Neo-Assyrian empire, as King Assurbanipal used the war with Babylon to amass a centralized repository of knowledge. These manuscripts were excavated in the nineteenth century in another instance of imperial adventurism, in the form of British and French archaeologists making forays into the Middle East, leading to the dispersal of the manuscripts across primarily Western museums. The chapter discusses the many links between Gilgamesh and imperial conflict, suggesting concrete pedagogical exercises that can be used to introduce students to postcolonial criticism and its relation to world literature.
Cynical Uses of Suffering
“Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right,” TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research, April 16, 2026. Link.
Excerpt: As with Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” the misinformation grift took advantage of real shock or trauma generated by the world-wide pandemic, harnessing the legitimate pain and paranoia widely shared among Western publics to turn a quick buck. But Covid-19 is an old story now: the first harvest of a now-routine Internet strategy. This strategy is spearheaded by a political movement I am calling the New Digital Right: it relies on social media influencers, platform affordances, and online virality to scramble political alliances and mobilize collective emotions of fear and outrage towards dark and destructive ends. The latest rupture online surrounds the topic of Israel in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Gaza after October 7th, 2023—an invasion that human rights organizations around the world, from the United Nations to B’Tselem, have declared a genocide. The case I make in this piece is as follows: the far-right is taking advantage of global attention to the genocide in Gaza, alongside Israel’s plummeting popularity among Western publics, to radicalize and recruit new followers. The U.S.-American far-right in particular is seizing upon the media vacuum created by government censorship of anti-war and anti-Zionist voices to launder and normalize their own virulently fascist and antisemitic politics.
Platforming Exilic Voices in the Museum
With Sarah Graff. “From Poetry to Pedagogy: Platforming Exilic Voices in the Museum.” Book chapter, Teaching About the Ancient World in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, edited by Jen Thum, Carl Walsh, and Lisa Haney, Routledge, forthcoming.Â
A crucial tool for pedagogy within museum contexts, particularly in relation to ancient artifacts and cultures, is an emphasis on the movement and migration of peoples and objects throughout the arc of human history. The displacement of museum objects across time and space adds to their value to the institutions and nations that house them, but the same attitude is not extended towards migrants, refugees, and diaspora communities who share with those objects not only a place of origin, but a story of exile and a journey across the world under the exigencies of war, colonialism, and precarity (Sergi 2021). This emphasis on movement (and the cultural hybridity it engenders) is not new to critical museology: “objects as migrants” has been advanced by Arjun Appadurai (2017) in direct relation to the story of refugees in Germany, and as a step towards the “post-ethnological” museum (Clifford 2016). Stefan Weber of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Museum für Islamische Kunst has long deployed such an outlook to combat the othering of Islam and Muslims in Europe, as with his “Kulturgeschichten” project for German educators and “Objects of Transfer” and Multaka projects for the galleries (2018). Nevertheless, providing migrants themselves with a platform from which to tell their stories of movement in relation to ancient artifacts in exile is far more rare. Such a doubled move can serve as an inclusive pedagogical tool for the public, restoring their experience of ancient artifacts to one grounded in networks of human relation, rather than the more common framing in which these objects are universalized as “world heritage” (Scott 2012). The two primary case-studies this chapter contends with are: (1) the ongoing collaboration (which began in 2019) between the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East and the Narratio Fellowship program, and (2) the “GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin” community event (2023), organized by Aya Labanieh and Dr. Sophus Helle at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany.
Nefarious Solidarities
Nefarious Solidarities: Manosphere Islam, Deviant Sexuality, and the Increasing Diversity of the Digital Far Right. Under review.
Chapter in edited volume. Emerged from the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Birthing the Nation” on the intersection between far-right politics and reproduction, hosted at PennState in October 2025.
What Is Digital Ethnography
What Is Digital Ethnography? Notes on Method, Safety, and Ethics. Under Review.
Journal article. Co-authored with Columbia University’s Narrative Intelligence Lab, under PI Dennis Tenen.