Education

  • Ph.D. from Université de Montréal, Québec (2004)
  • MA  from Université de Montréal, Québec (1999)
  • BA from Université de Manouba Tunisia (1997)

Research

He teaches and researches in the intersecting fields of modern and contemporary multilingual Arab literatures and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East; Arab popular music and film; comparative ethnic, Muslim and Arab diasporas studies, namely in Euro-Americas; and postcolonial and modernist comparative cultural studies. He is open to doctoral projects in any of the above and other related fields, but welcomes in particular those that seek to elaborate new approaches to the relations between the poetics and the politics of literatures and cultures.

Publications

Featured Works

Articles

  • “Jihad on the Couch,” Psychoanalysis and History 20.3 (Fall 2018): 371-386.
  • “Islam after Lacan,” After Lacan, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge UP, 2018): 206-224.
  • “Afteraffect: Arabic Literature and Affective Politics,” Representations 143 (Summer 2018): 118-137.
  • “Film and Cultural Dissent in Tunisia,” in Social Currents in North Africa: Culture and Governance after the Arab Spring, ed. Osama Abi-Mershed (Oxford UP, 2018): 165-185.
  • “Powers of Powerlessness: The Politics of Defeat in the Cinema of Nouri Bouzid,” Journal of Visual Culture 16.2    (August 2017): 253-273.
  • “Sons of a Beach: The Politics of Bastardy in the Cinema of Nouri Bouzid,” Cultural Politics 13.2 (July 2017): 177-193.
  • “Dissident Tunisia: Culture and Revolt,” in The Arab Uprisings: Catalysts, Dynamics, and Trajectories, eds. Fahed Al-Sumait, Nele Lenze and Michael Hudson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): 93-111.
  • “Tunisia,” in Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East, eds. Vijay Prashad and Paul Amar (Minnesota UP, 2013), 1-23.
  • “Trauma Ties: Chiasmus and Community in Lebanese Civil War Literature,” in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary Criticism, eds. Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (Routledge 2013): 77-90.
  • “Rapping and Remapping the Tunisian Revolution,” in Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music, eds. Karima Laachir and Saeed Talajooy (Routledge 2013), 207-225.
  • “Rap and Revolt in the Arab World,” Social Text 30.4 (2012): 25-53.
  • “Enduring Left Melancholia: Mahfouz’s The Beggar and the Nasserite Intellectual,” in MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, eds., Waïl S. Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj (MLA 2012): 65-84.
  • “The Novel in the Maghreb,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed., Peter Logan (Blackwell Publishing, 2011):     475-483.
  • “Formless Form: Elias Khoury’s City Gates and the Poetics of Trauma,” Comparative Literature Studies 47.4 (2010):   504-532.
  • “Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema,” The Journal of North African Studies 15.1  (2010): 105-126.
  • “War, Poetry, Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq,” Public Culture 22.1 (2010): 33-65.
  • “Everyday Arabness: The Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review 9.2  (2009): 21-44.
  • “Introduction: Race, Islam, and the Task of Muslim and Arab American Writing,” PMLA 123.5 (2008): 1573-1580.
  • “In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent,” Comparative Literature Studies 45.2 (2008): 228-246.
  • “Reel Violence: Paradise Now and the Collapse of the Spectacle,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28.1 (2008): 20-37.

Teaching

  • Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (2004-2006)
  • University of Michigan, Dearborn (2006-2007)
  • UCLA Departments of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (2007-currently)

Awards

  • New Directions Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2017-19)
  • Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (2004-6)
  •   Rackham Faculty Research Grant from the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2007)