Shamoon Zamir
Professor of Literature and Art History; Global Network Professor of Literature and Art History, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA, University of London; MA, Institute of United States and Latin American Studies, London; PhD, University of London
Research Websites: Akkasah: Center for Photography Arab Center for the Study of Art
Research Areas: literature, photography, intellectual history
Shamoon Zamir works primarily in the areas of literature, photography, and intellectual history. Dark Voice (University of Chicago Press, 1995), a study of the African American writer W.E.B. Du Bois and his major literary work The Souls of Black Folk, explored literature’s dialogues with American and European philosophy and sociology; The Gift of the Face (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) explored the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in the work of the early twentieth-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and examined the ways in which image and text, art and science, pictorialist photography and anthropology come together in Curtis’s portraits of Native Americans. Professor Zamir’s latest book, Photography and Citizenship (Silvana Editoriale, 2026), offers a strikingly new account of Edward Steichen’s famous exhibition The Family of Man as a visual construction of cosmopolitan citizenship in the aftermath of World War II and within the cultural politics of the Cold War. Helen Levitt: New York (The Museum of Modern Art) appeared in 2021.
Zamir’s edited or co-edited works include The Cambridge Companion to W.E.B. DuBois (2008), The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (2012), The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age (2020), Yasser Alwan: Egypt Every Day (2022), and The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram – Letters and Essays (2007).
Zamir has additionally published on twentieth-century African American and Native American fiction, on modern poetry and on literature and anthropology. He has translated a volume of short stories by Zamiruddin Ahmad from Urdu: The East Wind and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002). He was the co-founder and co-editor of Talus, a small press and journal specializing in poetry, contemporary international writing, and cultural studies, and was series editor for “American Studies: Culture, Society & the Arts”. He is also the founder and director of Akkasah: Center for Photography at NYUAD, an archive of vernacular and documentary photography from the Middle East.
Ongoing projects include a monograph on philosopher Max Horkheimer and photography, as well as shorter explorations in twentieth-century European art and Shakespeare in Hollywood.
Zamir studied English and American literatures and American Studies at the University of London and taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Chicago, York University and the University of London before joining NYUAD.
While at NYUAD, he has taught a variety of courses on art history and literature and served as Associate Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities, Program Head for Art and Art History, Chair of the Faculty Council, and has also served in other administrative capacities.