Tarek El-Ariss is an author, scholar and the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his war memoir, Water on Fire (Other Press, 2024). Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy and comparative literature, his work deals with questions of displacement, war and desire. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers and characters with complicated relations to home and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and Choice.