Laila Riazi is a writer, teacher, editor and scholar.
Her criticism, translations and essays appear in Social Text, Parapraxis and the Los Angeles Review of Books. An essay on Mohammad Malas’s documentary Al-Manam (The Dream) is forthcoming in Commonplace Poetics, and an article on Etel Adnan’s poetry for Palestine will be published in Middle Eastern Literatures. Laila’s research and teaching has been supported by a UC Dissertation-Year Fellowship, the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Daniel E. Koshland Jr. Student Fellowship, the Middlebury Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference, the Yefe Nof Residency, the Psychosocial Foundation and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
Laila was previously an editor of Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, manager of the Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society and founder and coordinator of the Psychoanalysis Working Group at the Townsend Center.
In Spring of 2026, she will receive her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature (Designated Emphasis: Critical Theory), where she has taught courses on literature, theory and writing. Entitled The Broken House of Poetry: Disalienation and the Mythopoetics of Solidarity (1948-1979), her dissertation reappraises the visual and poetic genres of Third World internationalism across the Mashriq, the Maghrib and Iran in order to disentangle histories of decolonial thought from nationalism and nation-building projects.
In Fall 2026 she will join the University of Amsterdam as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Arts and Culture (2026-2028).
