AJ Naddaff is a Knight Hennessy Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Literature department at Stanford University, working on Nahḍa-Tanzīmāt entanglements. He graduated from Davidson College in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and received a master’s degree in Arabic literature and Near Eastern studies from the American University of Beirut in 2022. He worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in Lebanon, is working on his second Arabic novel translation project, and has been published in the Washington Post, the Intercept, and Columbia Journalism Review among other outlets. He is a two-time Fulbright research grant recipient, a 2019 recipient of the Overseas Press Club Award, and was a 2019 fellow of the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad.
Research Project
This project, tentatively titled “Ottomans on the Move: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Modern Adab, and the Production of News,” seeks to bridge Arabic, French and Ottoman-Turkish intellectual traditions by examining how 19th-century Istanbul served as a multilingual and multicultural hub for the development of Arabic modernity and Eastern Mediterranean newspapers. The story’s protagonist is Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805–1887), a pioneering Arabic intellectual and journalist, whose life was deeply shaped by the last two decades he spent in late Ottoman Istanbul. Through this study, I aim to challenge monolingual approaches to Ottoman and Arab modernities by contextualizing Shidyāq within the broader intellectual networks of the Ottoman imperial center and the architectural and urban landscape of the city at large.
