New York University

Sinan Antoon's teaching and research interests lie in premodern Arabo-Islamic culture and contemporary Arab culture and politics. His dissertation, "The Poetics of the Obscene," is the first study of the 10th-century Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj. His poems and essays (in Arabic) have appeared in As-Safir, Al-Adab, and Masharef and in the Nation, Middle East Report, Al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Journal of Palestine Studies, World Literature Today, and Ploughshares, among others. He has published a collection of poems, The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007), and a novel, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights, 2007), which has been translated into German, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Italian. His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. His cotranslation of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004, and his translation of Darwish's last prose book, In the Presence of Absence, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in 2010. He returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to codirect a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. He is on the advisory board of Arab Studies Journal, a contributing editor to Banipal, and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. In 2008 and 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the EUME (Europe in the Middle East-The Middle East in Europe) Program at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Professor Antoon has appeared on NPR, Al Jazeera English, and The Charlie Rose Show.