Category: Favorites

Worm v. world

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This essay, co-written with my partner Aya Labanieh, considers the relation between the smallest and the largest scales of the epic genre: worms and worlds, bugs and Floods, single lines and massive cycles. The essay culminates with a new reading of the interaction between Gilgamesh and Uta-napishti in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, showing that the two men are arguing in part about the nature of grief (Gilgamesh mourns his lover, Uta-napishti mourns the whole world) and in part about the proper scope of the epic genre, paving the way for an elegant and heartrending compromise in the last lines of the poem.

With Aya Labanieh, “The shortness of epics: Gilgamesh between
worm and world,” in Short story as world literature: The deep history and modern lives of an impure genre, edited by Delia Ungureanu and Amândio Reis (London: Bloomsbury, 2026), 35–48.

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Beowulf

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My Danish translation of Beowulf was the first in over two decades: despite its canonical fame in the English-speaking world and its setting near the Danish city of Roskilde, the poem remains little-known in Denmark. That is why I decided to depart from my usual Babylonian haunts to render this epic poem in Danish alliterating verse. The book ends with a lengthy afterword in which I explore the poem’s history and literary structure, arguing that the poem can be read as an extended meditation on time.

Beowulf: En gendigtning. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2025. Link.

The shape of water

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For the first volume of the Library of Babylonian Literature, my chapter argues that Enuma Elish depicts the creation of the world in fundamentally linguistic terms, that is, as a simultaneous emergence of shapes, names, and beings. The epic traces the transformation of the world from a nameless, shapeless, fluid state to a cosmos in which things—and people and gods—come to acquire fixed forms, identities, hierarchies, and roles to play within the world order, that is, fates. The medium of this transformation is language, which is also the medium of the poem, setting up a complex set of relations between the content and the form of the story.

“The shape of water: Content and form in Enuma Elish,” in Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, edited by Johannes Haubold, Sophus Helle, Enrique JimĂ©nez, and Selena Wisnom, Library of Babylonian Literature 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 279–95.

Download the chapter for free here.

What is philology?

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The article proposes a new definition of philology as a systematic engagement with crises of reading, focused on the difficulties that prevent readers from gaining access to or drawing meaning from a given text, all the way from scrubbed signs to obscure ontologies. Responding to two recent interventions in the field—Philology by James Turner and World Philology by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang—the article explores the practices, history, and current state of philology.

“What is philology? From crises of reading to comparative reflections.” Poetics Today ,vol. 43, no. 4 (December 2022): 611–637. Link.

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Between two myths

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Drawing on my previous study of the surprisingly complex history of the concept “Mesopotamia” and its political import for modern Iraq, I argue that we must steer between two myths when discussing the ancient history of Iraq: the myth that Iraq is a somehow “artificial” nation that is bound to disintegrate, and the myth that it is a perennial unity, persisting across centuries. The real legacy of ancient Mesopotamia is that of a hybrid, multilingual, constantly shifting cultural entity.

“Between Two Rivers, Between Two Myths,” New Lines Magazine (14 October 2022). Link.

What was an author?

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The essay proposes a new framework for the study of premodern authors. Historically, authors have most often been depicted as textual transmitters, not original creators, so a focus on the middle position of premodern authors will lead to a more nuanced, inclusive history of authorship.

“What is an author? Old answers to a new question”, Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 2019), pp. 113–139. Link. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7368183

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The uncertainty of death

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In a monologue on mortality from the tenth tablet of Gilgamesh, the sage Uta-napishti depicts death through a set of poetic paradoxes: death is both certain, since it cannot be avoided, and uncertain, since we cannot know anything about it. The essay studies how Uta-napishti represents what he claims to be unrepresentable.

“Babylonian perspectives on the uncertainty of death: SB Gilgamesh X 301-321”, Kaskal, vol. 14 (2017), pp. 211–19.

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Mess O’Potamia returns

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Drawing on a skit from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, the essay argues that the notion of “Mesopotamia” can be used to evade or reconcile the contradictions that surround the modern nation of Iraq. The simple-looking concept of a single Mesopotamia belies a deeper complexity, produced by clashing discourses and historical shifts.

“The return of Mess O’Potamia: Time, space and politics in modern uses of ancient Mesopotamia”, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 19, no. 3 (December 2016), pp. 305–24. Link. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2016.1264250

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