Alfred Jeoffrey "AJ" Naddaff
2022: M.A., Arabic and Near Eastern Studies, The American University of Beirut
2020: Center for Arabic Study Abroad Program, The American University in Cairo, Egypt
2019: B.A., Political Science & Arab Studies, Davidson College
A.J. Naddaff is a Knight Hennessy Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, focusing on Ottoman and Arabic cultural modernity. Before pursuing his Ph.D., he reported as a freelancer and then breaking news writer for the Associated Press in Beirut, covering Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. His journalistic shadow has crept into his academic interests, and he is writing a dissertation on the late Ottoman period, investigating the relationship between journalism and other literary forms, notably modern narrative discourse. Positing Constantinople/Istanbul as another 19th century of the world, A.J. is also interested in how the city became a multicultural hub for many non-Turkish authors, most notably, the Arabic trickster polymath Ahmad Fares al-Shidyaq (d. 1887). Related interests include: theory of the novel, translation studies, urban history, and pre-islamic poetry.
A.J. is also an active translator and cultural journalist. His first book translation project, 'Atabat al-Alam (Threshold of Pain), a literary memoir by Palestinian-Syrian scriptwriter Hassan Samy Yousef, was co-translated with Rebecca Joubin and Nicolas Lobo with IBEX publishers in 2021. He is currently working with Nicolas Lobo on translating Rachid El Daif’s novel Tablīt al-Baḥr (Paving the Sea) under contract with Syracuse University Press for fall 2026. He regularly interviewed translator-scholars for NYU's Library of Arabic Literature blog and conducted one of the last interviews with acclaimed Syrian novelist Khalid Khalifa before he passed away in the fall of 2024, which he published in Lit Hub. His articles have appeared in LARB, the Intercept, Columbia Journalism Review, the Washington Post among others.
At Stanford, from 2022-2024, he co-ran the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies Student Network (ASN). He taught Arabic 101 for three quarters and served as a TA for a class titled Introduction to Comparative Literature and another on Existentialism and the Novel.