"In one sense, all of my work so far has been about forms of cross-cultural encounter," said Shamoon Zamir, NYU Abu Dhabi associate professor of Literature and Visual Studies. Indeed, for the past 30 or so years, this has been his primary academic focus. An Americanist working in the areas of literature, photography, and intellectual history, Zamir turned to cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural studies after studying with Professor Eric Mottram, a pioneer of American studies at the University of London and a key figure in the experimental poetry scene in the UK.

Zamir arrived in England from Pakistan when he was ten and developed an interest in literature, in part under the influence of his father who was a journalist and fiction writer. "I had a passion for Milton and wanted to study the 17th century, but the encounter with Mottram fundamentally transformed everything that I was doing as an undergraduate and, therefore, as a graduate student,” said Zamir.

Despite the fact that he professes to being "dangerously a dilettante," Zamir's interest in
American studies has been a constant throughout his academic career. "It allowed me to deal with issues of cultural difference and identity without falling into what I saw as the traps of identity politics," he explained. "I was not interested in studying Urdu literature because I was Pakistani, in doing Asian studies because I was Asian, or in pursuing Islamic studies because I was born a Muslim. I very consciously made a decision that, for me, that would be a pitfall — a self-reflective study that would lead to a kind of identitarian politics that I wasn't interested in. Although I don't think I was fully aware of this when I was a student, I think that the complexity of American cultural history and the sheer vitality of the American achievement in the arts allowed me to negotiate both the experience of being an immigrant and to think of the meanings of the arts within an emergent international and global culture. American studies has been an indirect way of dealing with these issues, and, for me at least, a more creative way." This is not to say that American culture has been Zamir's only interest. He has also translated fiction from Urdu and, as a graduate student, co-founded Talus, a small press journal and book series that published contemporary writers and critics from around the world.

Zamir's first book was Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, which, he explained, "attempts to read Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a landmark of African American literature,
 in the context of American pragmatism, European philosophy, and the development of social science in America." Recently, he completed his second book, a study of portraiture and photography focused on the work of Edward S. Curtis. Continuing the investigation of early-20th-century American culture begun with the work on Du Bois, the book reassesses Curtis' portraits of Native Americans and explores the relationship of ethics and aesthetics in photography.

Zamir is now in the stages of launching what he hopes will be a long-standing, collaborative, and international research project on Arab photography based in the region. Named Photography at the Arab Crossroads, the multi-part project will endeavor to develop a series of publications, exhibitions, and archival collections based on photography from the Arab world and the surrounding region. As Zamir explained, "The field of research in Arab photography is relatively poor, by comparison, say, with even African or Asian photography. The scholarship is fragmented and not easily available." And despite photography becoming a preferred medium of expression for many artists in the Arab world, the history and variety of Arab photography are not well known or sufficiently understood.