Abstract: It’s been over fifteen years since Moustafa Bayoumi’s book How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was first published, and more than twenty years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. Yet, being young and Muslim (or Arab, or Arab and Muslim) in the United States hasn’t gotten any easier. This lecture examines Muslim American life through these years with a focus on current domestic tensions, overseas violence, and a looming US presidential election, one where Arab American and Muslim American votes could prove consequential.
Bio: Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Bayoumi is also a columnist for The Guardian. He is a regular contributor to The Nation, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive, and other places. He is the co-editor, with Andrew Rubin, of The Selected Works of Edward Said: 1996-2006 (Vintage) and editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (O/R and Haymarket Books). His article “Journey to Guantánamo” was a finalist for the 2023 Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s Excellence in Reporting award. Bayoumi has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He lives in Brooklyn.
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