Aida Bardissi is a poet & PhD student of Middle East Studies at New York University.

Her doctoral project examines films of the Nasser era as an inquiry into constructions of national ‘authenticity’ — particularly as it relates to the question(s) of race, temporality, and indigeneity. At large, her work engages with the various civilisational myths surrounding the Egyptian state by addressing its various sites of promulgation: including museum and performance studies, cinema studies, comparative literature, and liberation psychology.

Aida’s academic work has been selected for the Middle East Studies Association Conference in 2022 and 2023, and the Kent State Philosophy Graduate Student Conference in 2024. Before beginning her doctoral work, she was a History teacher at York Preparatory School and was formerly the Program and Staff Assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.

With the benefit of polylinguism, she has also administered English as Second Language courses at the ICRM (Islington Center for Refugees and Migrants), in London, England.

You will likely find her watching The Twilight Zone.