The AAUP is pleased to announce the appointment of Karim Mattar as the new faculty editor of the online Journal of Academic Freedom. Mattar, who will begin his term as editor with the seventeenth volume of the journal, is associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A new call for papers for the volume, to be published in fall 2026, appears on the AAUP website and in the print edition of this issue of Academe.
Mattar works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education; other research interests include Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, media and technology, and critical theory. He is the author of Specters of World Literature: Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East and has contributed to numerous academic journals and edited books and collections. His editorial experience includes service as coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East and as coeditor or editor of three special journal issues—among them, one on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on literary studies for English Language Notes, where he has been on the editorial board for a decade. Mattar serves on the steering committee of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and as cochair of the coalition's Palestine Caucus.
Volume 16 of the journal, coedited by Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro, is scheduled for publication in late October. Focusing on the implications of philanthropic and other special-interest influence for higher education and academic freedom, the volume will appear on the AAUP website, along with past volumes, at https://www.aaup.org/JAF.