Shamoon Zamir
Professor of Literature and Art History; Global Network Professor of Literature and Art History
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 in the areas of literature, photography and intellectual history. His study of the African American writer W.E.B. Du Bois explored literature’s dialogues with philosophy and sociology and his new book, The Gift of the Face, explores the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in the work of the early twentieth-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and examines the ways in which image and text, art and science, pictorialist photography and anthropology come together in Curtis’s portraits of Native Americans.
Prof. Zamir has in addition published on twentieth-century African American and Native American fiction and on modern poetry and has translated short stories from Urdu. He was the co-founder of Talus, a small press and journal specializing in poetry, contemporary international writing and cultural studies and is a series editor for American Studies: Culture, Society & the Arts.
His current projects include studies in twentieth-century American photography and literature. He is also the Director of Akkasah: Center for Photography at NYUAD. The center is developing a photographic archive, and also a conference and exhibition series devoted to photography, with a primary focus on the Middle East.
Prof. Zamir studied English and American literatures and American Studies at the University of London and has taught at the University of Chicago, York University and the University of London before joining NYUAD.