Shamoon Zamir

Shamoon Zamir is Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He 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; The Gift of the Face 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. Zamir’s latest book, Photography and Citizenship, 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 the Cold War.

In addition, Zamir has 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 was series editor for American Studies: Culture, Society & the Arts. He is also the Director of Akkasah: Center for Photography at NYUAD, an archive of vernacular and documentary photography from the Middle East.

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 NYU Abu Dhabi.