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New Faculty Spring 2025

Academic Year 2024-2025

NYU Abu Dhabi leadership and faculty are researchers, scholars, and artists of extraordinary distinction within and beyond their disciplines, and at the same time exceptional teachers, dedicated to supporting and challenging their students and to transforming them into intellectual colleagues. In addition to a growing cohort of full-time faculty, the University also draws talent from across NYU’s global network and hosts visiting faculty from outstanding universities around the world.

Today NYU Abu Dhabi has a faculty of more than 300 experts who are drawn to the University by the quality and passion of our students, by a very favorable research environment, and, as importantly, by the institution’s resolve to contribute significantly to the region and to shape a better world through education and research.

Meet the New Faculty by Academic Unit

  • Abdulrazak Gurnah

    Arts Professor of Literature

     

    Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and is now best-known as a novelist. His fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and he was on the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. In 2021 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for ‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’

    His main academic interest is in postcolonial writing and in discourses associated with colonialism, especially as they relate to Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including Naipaul, Rushdie and Zoe Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press 2007).

    Abdulrazak is the author of the highly acclaimed novels Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise, Admiring Silence, By The Sea, Desertion, The Last Gift, and Gravel Heart. His latest book, Afterlives is published by Bloomsbury.

    Research interests that primarily revolve around literature, colonialism, postcolonialism, and the effects of displacement and migration.

    PhD in English and American Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

    Previously: Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures, University of Kent, UK

    William Swadling

    Visiting Professor of Legal Studies

     
     

    William Swadling is Professor of Law at the University of Oxford and the Senior Law Fellow at Brasenose College. He chairs the law faculty's teaching groups in Restitution, Trusts, and Personal Property. He is the editor of several books, including The Quistclose Trust: Critical Essays. His articles on the intersection of trusts, property, and restitution have been cited in the highest courts of England, Australia, and Singapore. He contributed to Halsbury's Laws of England (4th ed, reissue) and wrote the 'Property' section in Burrows (ed), English Private Law (3rd ed, 2013). He co-founded the Restitution Law Review with Professors Peter Birks and Francis Rose and held visiting professorships at the University of Hamburg, Seoul National University, and others. He is an academic associate at One Essex Court, a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and an academic member of the Chancery Bar Association.

    Master of Laws (LLM), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

    Currently: Professor of Law, University of Oxford

    Nada Shabout

    Visiting Professor of Art History

     
     

    Nada Shabout, a scholar in modern and contemporary Arab art, earned her PhD in Humanities, Art History, and Criticism from the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) and founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). Her publications include Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007) and co-edited volumes like Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018). Shabout has curated notable exhibitions, including A Banquette for Seaweed: Snapshots from the Arab 1980s (2022-2023) and Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art (2010). She received prestigious awards, including the 2020 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Literature. A Project Advisor for the Saudi National Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2019, she serves on various boards, including the Visual Art Commission in Saudi Arabia. Major awards of her research include Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation 2018; The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) fellow 2006, 2007, Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008. Her current book project, Demarcating Modernism in Iraqi Art, is forthcoming with Americal University of Cairo Press.

    PhD in the Humanities, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, United States of America

    Visiting From: Regents Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, University of North Texas, USA

    Denise deCaires Narain

    Senior Research Scholar and Research Professor

     
     

    Denise deCaires Narain is Emeritus Reader in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Sussex. She taught courses on postcolonial, Caribbean and women’s writing and on postcolonial feminist discourses. She has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing, including two monographs, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style and Writers and Their Work: Olive Senior, as well as several essays from current research on the representation of servants in postcolonial women’s writing. She is co-editor for Palgrave’s Contemporary Women’s Writing series and co-editor of the journal, Women: A Cultural Review. Her research interests include Women's writing; postcolonial writing; feminism; Caribbean culture and writing.

    PhD in English, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

    Previously: Emeritus Reader in Postcolonial Literatures, University of Sussex, UK

    Alia Yunis

    Visiting Associate Professor of Practice of Heritage and Film

     
     

    Alia Yunis works with intersecting fields of environment and transoceanic heritage, particularly in the Arab and Muslim worlds and their diaspora. A writer, filmmaker, and journalist, her work has been translated into 10 languages. She is a founder of HeritageLab, a global interactive digital platform for community-based museums of memory. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest, continues to play in festivals worldwide, including the Smithsonian. She is in early production on a film about the heritage of the date palm. Alia is the lead editor of Futures Stories in the Global Heritage Industry (Routledge, 2024), a collaboration with heritage scholar Robert Parthesius and former NYUAD students. She also co-edited Re-Orienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana University Press, 2024) with Dale Hudson. Her novel, The Night Counter (Random House), has been praised by major publications. She co-founded ZUMEFF, the Gulf's longest-running film festival.

    MA in Film and Television, American University, Washington DC, USA

    Currently: Writer, Journalist, and Filmmaker

    Gina Choi

    Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History

     
     

    Gina Choi is a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She specializes in premodern Korean and Japanese painting. She received her PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, MA in Art History from Tufts University, and BA in Art History and Philosophy from Boston College. Her current project, entitled “Reaching ‘Peach Blossom Spring’: Poetry and Painting in Fifteenth-Century Korea and Japan,” explores a fifteenth-century Korean and Japanese phenomenon of envisioning an ideal place, representing it in poetry and painting, and combining the two into one unified work. Her research has been supported by the Japan Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research interests include comparative and transcultural studies of East Asian art, the relationship between image and text, and collective agency in art-making.

    PhD in Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, USA

    Previously: Teaching Assistant/ PhD Candidate at Princeton University

    Alanood Bukhammas

    Adjunct Lecturer of Art and Art History

     

    Alanood Bukhammas is a Graphic Design educator, currently at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University in Dubai, UAE. She uses visual tools and mediums to communicate abstract concepts and ideas, often concerning youth and female empowerment in the region. Her interest in the social aspects of her field has propelled her into academia at Zayed University, where she interacts with the next generation of designers. She uses both her insights into tradition and culture and her international training to supply a global standard curriculum customized to her students. Her current research encompasses rudimental expressions of design, studied through the historic and current visual culture of the Gulf. Bukhammas holds a Master’s degree in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship in Design from Goldsmiths, University of London.

    MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Design Pathway, University of London, UK

    Currently: Instructor, Faculty of Graphic Design, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates

    Salha Reema Fadda

    Adjunct Lecturer of Art and Art History

     

    Salha Reema Fadda is a writer, editor, and DPhil researcher at the University of Oxford whose work engages with the political economy of artistic production. Her writing has been commissioned by leading international publications, including Sternberg Press, Frieze, TANK magazine, Art Papers, Ocula, and Ibraaz, where she was the Commissioning Editor of Reviews. In addition to developing a lecture series on Arab visual cultures for The University of Oxford and Darat al Funun, she has programmed cultural events in Palestine, Cairo, Saudi Arabia, and London.

    MA in Cultural Studies and Comparitive Literature, Edinburgh University, Scotland

    Currently: Editor, Writer, Educator, and Researcher