Omar Khalifah is associate professor of Arabic literature and culture at Georgetown University in Qatar. He received his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2013. His research interests include modern Arabic literature, Palestine studies, memory studies, Arabic and world literature, and cinema and nationalism in the Arab world.
Professor Khalifah is the author of Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary (2016). His second monograph, The Unsettling Nakba: Memory Studies, Palestinian Literature, and the Challenge of Remembering, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in February 2027. He is also co-editor of Darwish: Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2026). His articles and essays have appeared in publications including Middle East Critique, Journal of World Literature, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera.
Khalifah is also an Arabic-language fiction writer. His debut novel, Sand-Catcher (Coffee House Press, 2024), translated from Arabic by Barbara Romaine, won the 2025 National Translation Award in Prose and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.