Founding Director

 

A. M. Awad is a faculty member at the Institute, where he convenes seminars on Arab and western thought, and a Fellow at Harvard University, where his research traverses history, literature, and religion. He has undertaken ethnographic work in the US, India, and Brazil, and lectures internationally on education and the humanities. A board member of Change, he was a Herchel Smith Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

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Professor of Philology

 

S. O. Saleem is a faculty member at the Institute, where she convenes seminars on comparative literature and poetics. She holds doctoral degrees in Arabic literature and criticism, and her research spans the history, theory, and practice of classical and contemporary Arabic writing. A celebrated teacher, Saleem has taught language, literature, and criticism for ten years, cultivating a pedagogy of intimacy and intellectual agility. Elswehere, she is a practitioner of unpublished fiction.

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Associate Director

 

Omar Zakaria is the associate director of the Institute, where he tends to the library and manages the daily operations of the programs in Arabic and English. A writer and historian, his work on the history of libraries has appeared in print, and his second novel, Al-Qurtubi, will be published in 2020. Zakaria is the non-diegetic voice of Arabic specials on National Geographic, and of the Institute's phone.

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