Moustafa Bayoumi

Professor and journalist Moustafa Bayoumi was born in Switzerland to Egyptian parents and raised in Canada before moving to New York City for graduate studies at Columbia University in 1991. He still lives in New York, where he teaches in the English department at Brooklyn College and has won two awards for excellence in teaching. His scholarly work has focused on the history of Islam and Islamophobia in American culture as well as the work of Edward Said, an esteemed Palestinian American postcolonial scholar and public intellectual who mentored Bayoumi during his doctoral studies. Bayoumi has also written on a wide variety of political topics, primarily American foreign policy in the Middle East and immigration policy, for various popular media outlets including The Nation, CNN, the London Review of Books, and the Progressive Media Project. He is probably best known for How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?—which won an American Book Award in 2008 and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2009—or perhaps for composing the most re-tweeted tweet of the 2016 Presidential Debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (“I'm a Muslim, and I would like to report a crazy man threatening a woman on a stage in Missouri. #debate”). His most recent book, This Muslim American Life, explores Muslim Americans’ perspectives on the War on Terror and also won the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.