People

I am a philologist with an interest in the history of the Arabic languages and literatures of North Africa, Southern Europe, and the sea in between.

In my research and pedagogy, I am concerned with raising awareness and appreciation of the Arabic languages in all their diversity.  While received opinion, and much Arabist scholarship too, has long held the Classical or Standard variety (الفصحى) to be the only "Arabic" with a literary history worth speaking of, my attention for the last fifteen years has been captured by texts written in regional vernaculars or "dialects" (الدارجة\العامية), including those varieties conventionally rendered in non-Arabic scripts ("Judeo-Arabic" or Arabic written in Hebrew characters; Maltese and other Maghrebi Arabics written in Latin characters).

My most recent attempt to delve into Arabic literature's polymorphous past is to be found in my book, The Judeo-Arabic Journalism of Tunisia and Tripolitania: Texts, Translations, and Commentaries (Brill, forthcoming 2027). The volume presents a wide selection of texts from the Judeo-Arabic journalism of Tunisia and Tripolitania (Libya), transcribed in Arabic script, together with English translations and commentaries. It includes an extended historical introduction that traces the emergence of the Eastern Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic press against the background of merchant epistles, manuscript rentals, and religious translations, and outlines the principle actors, events, and cultural and political trends that contributed to its emergence, flourishing, and decline.

My next book project, tentatively titled في الأدب الملحون: قراءات في الدارجات المغاربية والعاميات المصرية (On Arabic Vernacular Literature: Readings in Egyptian and Maghrebi Dialect Writings) is a comparative and historical study of Arabic vernacular literatures in North Africa (including Egypt).

I have translated three books: Hussein Nassereddine's How to see the palace pillars as if they were palm trees (2024); Using Life (2017; Istikhdam al-Haya, 2014), written by Ahmed Naji and illustrated by Ayman Al Zorkany; and the pseudo-anonymous gothic livre de colportage, 'Amaliyyat Qurun al-Nahs al-A'zam (عملية قرون النحس الآعظم).

My creative and critical works have appeared in Akhbar al-Adab, Arabica, Banipal, Isdar Mustaqel, Jadaliyya, the Journal of Arabic Literature, Khatt 30, Mada Masr, Ma3azef, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Rusted Radishes, The New Inquiry, and Wasla.

I am also an amateur bookmaker and paper marbler.  My first chapbook, Qatatis Bikri ("Cats of Yore"),  assembles a speculative archive of ephemera about cats, poetry, time travel, and Tunisia.