Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship elaborates on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. Whether her source material is literature, film, or digital media, she seeks to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world. Increasingly, her work has highlighted the affective impact of seismic social events such as mass emigration, rapid urbanization, or war on national culture, and probed the ways that cultural texts attempt to make sense of prolonged and continuous crisis. She is the author of Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (IB Tauris, 2015), and with Alireza Doostdar, the co-producer and co-host of the video series Gaming Islam.