I am a writer. Recent subjects have included a short story about a hunt for unique gestures amid the sad repetitions of stock photography, an essay about money and migration in Juba, South Sudan, and a grammar of redacted documents. 

Currently, I am a 2014 UNESCO Laureate Artist in Creative Writing. I just finished a residency at the Dar Al-Ma'mûn, in Marrakech, Morocco. I am a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.

I was educated at the University of Oxford, l'EHESS-Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of California, Berkeley; I have a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the latter institution. I have lived in Britain, Cambodia, Egypt, France, the Netherlands, Kenya, America, and South Sudan. I've taught political philosophy at Sciences-Po Paris, and anthropology at Berkeley, and in San Quentin State Prison, California.

I have a book under contract with the British publishers Hurst & Co., provisionally entitled Line Language: On the Borders of the Middle East, and am working on my first novel, Redacted Mind.

I am also a researcher on South Sudan with Small Arms Survey, the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, a journal of literature in translation, and a fellow at the The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. My work has been published in the British Guardian, the Washington Monthly, and Onsite Review, amongst others places.

You can reach me by email at my first name, followed by a dot, and then my second name, and then @gmail.com.