Featured Faculty

Ghazi Al-Mulaifi | Faculty Highlight

Ghazi Al-Mulaifi, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi, PhD is an applied-ethnomusicologist and professor of music who earned his Ph.D. in music from New York University (2016). Ghazi will join the Music program at NYUAD in fall of 2021. Al-Mulaifi is also a Venice Biennale artist, composer, global jazz musician, and founder of Boom.Diwan. His research interests include Kuwaiti pearl diving music, global jazz, and heritage production. His current musical efforts include leading his ensemble Boom.Diwan, where he and traditional Kuwaiti musicians dialog Kuwaiti bahri (sea) music with global jazz traditions for the purpose of creating a new Kuwaiti music that revives a musical tradition of dialog and exchange, teaching Gulf music, global jazz and, and writing about Gulf heritage.

Nathalie Handal | Faculty Highlight

Nathalie Handal, Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing

Nathalie Handal will be joining the Literature and Creative Writing program in fall of 2021. Nathalie was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes, she “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination—a contemporary Orpheus.” She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Life in a Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award Winner and finalist for the Foreword Book Award, and the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. She has written eight plays, and her creative nonfiction and flash reportage has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, The Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others. She writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine. 

Handal has promoted international literature through translation and research. She is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian; and co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. She has taught, lectured and/or given workshops globally, namely at Columbia University, La Sorbonne Paris, Yale-NUS Singapore, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Universitat Leipzig, Germany, among others.

Gregory Pardlo | Faculty Highlight

Gregory Pardlo, Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing

Gregory Pardlo will join NYUAD's Arts and Humanities division in fall 2021. Born in Philadelphia, Gregory Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University, Camden. As an undergraduate, he managed the small jazz club his grandfather owned in nearby Pennsauken, NJ. He received an MFA from New York University as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry, and an MFA in Nonfiction as a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University. Pardlo is the author of Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review / Honickman Prize, and translator from the Danish of Niels Lyngsoe’s, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace (Book*hug, 2004).

Gregory is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts in translation, among others. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, serves as Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, and is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative at Rutgers University. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU-Abu Dhabi.