Selected teaching
Visiting Professor, Columbia University (2024-27)
NARRATIVES OF RETURN (Department of French, with Thomas Dodman)
This seminar combined history, literature and film to explore the complex question of return — as fantasy, policy, horizon, paradox, temporary practice or new departure. Drawing largely on Francophone and Arab perspectives, we will delve into the history of nostalgia, post-revolutionary haunting, exile and migrations, as well as debates around restitution and the politics of restoration.
1001 NIGHTS, THEN AND NOW (Department of English and Comparative Literature)
This seminar explored the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of The Thousand and One Nights. An authorless collage built up over centuries, it is an “ocean” of narratives that has much to teach us about how stories work, whether they must come to an end, and our apparently bottomless desire to hear them. We considered how the Nights puts pressure on ideas of authorship and originality and enlarges our notion of what a book is — and might be.
HOW TO LOVE: MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ARABIC (Department of French, with Eliza Zingesser)
This seminar explored the many faces of love and desire in medieval Iberia and France to ask a broader question: what would be our understanding of lyric poetry, often taken to originate with the Troubadours, if we incorporated the poems and songs of Al-Andalus? We tried to tell a new story about the origins of European poetry by treating Arabic as one of the earliest vernacular literary languages on the continent, and by reading the points of contact between the Andalusian courts and those of Provence as an unfolding conversation.
TRANSLATION WORKSHOP (School of the Arts, Writing Program)
Translation is often seen as a work’s afterlife, never as rich as its first incarnation. This class took a more expansive view: students explored how translation, an art of response, could deepen their writing practice. Rather than mourn what is lost in the movement between languages, we saw how translation embodied a process of grafting: the tissues of two literatures join to continue their growth together. We considered how translations reflect the time and place of their creation and the sensibility of their creators, focusing on versions which remain in dialogue with the original work while transforming this work into something new.
Poetry Project (June 2025)
BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND OPACITY, a five-week workshop on translation, with Maru Pabon
92nd Street Y (June/July 2023)
READING ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, a four-week seminar
The earliest surviving evidence of a work by that name is a receipt from a Jewish bookseller in twelfth-century Cairo recording the loan of something called Alf layla wa layla, a thousand nights and a night. The receipt has survived because of the medieval Jewish belief that anything written in Hebrew script, even a receipt, was sacred, and therefore could not be destroyed even long after the text had served its purpose.
The book itself, written in Arabic, has been lost. Or rather, it went the way of all human speech: it was subject to change, censorship, embroidery, misremembering and adaptation. Whatever it may have meant in twelfth-century Cairo, the Nights has never been a stable thing, and has never stopped changing shape. It is a loose collection of stories with no single author, altered and passed on by editors and compilers, translators and scribes, each of whom has enhanced, cut, and shaped it over the centuries.
No one can say what the Nights is: are there forty stories or two hundred? Which ones are authentic? What does that even mean? Its earliest incarnation was already a reworking of a Persian text, which itself adapted material from India, China, and elsewhere. From the beginning, the Nights has been in perpetual translation