Assistant Professor
B.A., University of Baghdad, 1990
M.A.A.S., Georgetown University, 1995
Ph.D. Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Harvard University, 2006
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 .
