Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, educator, podcaster, and public speaker. He is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and host of the podcast Nerd from the Future. Fawaz is the author of two books including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. With Darieck Scott he co-edited the award-winning special issue of American Literature, "Queer about Comics" (2018) and with Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby he co-edited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022.

Fawaz is a contributing editor to Film Quarterly where he authors the column "Imagination Unbound." In it, he explores how contemporary media and popular culture inspire new and surprising democratic political visions in response to increasingly authoritarian times. Fawaz's popular writing on feminist and queer media, American cultural politics, and superhero comics has also appeared in the LA Review of Books's online channels Avidly and The Philosophical Salon. He recently joined Gayle Wald and Aaron Trammell as the new co-editors of NYU Press's Postmillennial Pop Series, which publishes cutting edge scholarship in contemporary popular culture studies.

In a 2022 article for On Wisconsin Magazine, journalist Jessica Steinhoff tells the story of Fawaz's career trajectory, from a teenage superhero comic book fan to an internationally recognized queer popular culture scholar. You can read the story here.

In Fall 2026, Fawaz launched his new podcast Nerd from the Future. Against the perception of college education as elitist and inaccessible, the podcast aims to make the university and its intellectual gifts available to everyone, hence the tagline: "It's time the university came to you." Each episode features inspiring conversations with the nation's leading humanities professors, as they playfully debunk popular myths about the modern university. In its first season, Nerd From the Future tackled some of the most pressing questions about higher education today: Is there such a thing as liberal bias on university campuses? Does humanities education even matter anymore? What exactly is DEI and why are people so mad about it? Like any great professor, each episode makes sense of these hot button issues with enthusiasm, curiosity, honesty and lots and lots of nerdiness. Season 2 of the podcast will be released in late March 2026.

Fawaz is currently at work on a new book project titled How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Lessons for Embracing a Diverse World. In it, he argues for the value of cultivating a uniquely psychedelic imagination in response to difference, diversity, and plurality—or, the simple fact that people are different from one another—as a way to reject the rising tide of xenophobia in our time. As part of this project he edited a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of "Psychedelic Imaginaries" (April 2025). This issue includes his new essay “Tripping on Mushrooms with Edward Said: The Case for Literary Studies as Holistic Medicine.” In this article, he argues for a rethinking of humanities education as a form of collective psychedelic therapy, which uses art, literature, and media, rather than psychoactive medicines, to induce positive, long-term transformations in students’ mental wellbeing. Fawaz also recently published his article “Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse” (April 2025) in the journal Theory & Event.

Since Fall 2024, Fawaz has been a contributing editor to Film Quarterly, where he authors the column “Imagination Unbound.” In that time, Fawaz has published essays on the films Civil War, Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, and Wicked; the global blockbuster video game franchise The Last of Us; and the acclaimed Star Wars television series Andor. He is currently preparing a column on the sexual politics of the break-out hit HBO series Heated Rivalry. As part of his work for the journal, Fawaz organized and moderated a panel on contemporary Arab American Media and Popular Culture, “Dis-Orienting Media: The Creative Vision of Arab American Cultural Production.” This panel included Maytha Alhassen (co-executive producer, Ramy), Thomas S. Dolan (ACLS Fellow, Emory University), and William Youmans (George Washington University). A full video recording of our conversation can be accessed here.

In June 2025, Fawaz was a teacher-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, one of the world’s leading consciousness expansion retreats. He lead a five-day self-guided workshop series titled "Think Like a Multiverse: Pathways to Wonder, Kinship and Radical Openness." Participants were introduced to a range of alternative models for confronting and embracing diversity, including Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness (a feminist theory of mixed-race identity), the indigenous kinship worldview, and cosmopolitanism and radical democracy. Each day combined open discussion of these various frameworks with a series of practical exercises including: communing with Esalen’s verdant plant-life, enacting deliberative democratic group debate, and talking to strangers. These activities strengthened participant’s skills in encountering and responding to difference with curiosity and good judgement, rather than fear, suspicion or anxiety. A daily schedule for the seminar can be found here; Fawaz's lively discussion with Sam Stern for the Esalen Podcast can be accessed here. In Summer 2026, Fawaz will offer a new workshop titled “The Thrill of Groundlessness: Flowing through Life Without Absolutes." A full description of this workshop and registration information can be accessed here.

Photo Credit: Bryce Richter, 2022