Nizar F. Hermes is Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages, the University of Virginia and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Of Lost Cities: The Maghribī Poetic Imagination (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) and The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2012), and co-editor, with Gretchen Head, of The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). In addition to several peer-reviewed book chapters, his articles have appeared in numerous journals. A polyglot academic and poet of North African origin, he has published poetry in both English and Arabic. He currently plans to publish a multilingual poetry collection titled A Blitz on the Territories of Amnesia, or Very Exiled Thoughts.