Rawad Wehbe studies Arabic poetry, poetics, and literary theory. His dissertation examines the mukhaḍramūn—a generation of poets who lived between the pre-Islamic and Islamic era—focusing on the network of emotions surrounding the poetic experience of existing in the threshold of transition, known as khaḍramah. Drawing from theories of affect and emotion, he departs from a historical study of the mukhaḍramūn to develop a theory of khaḍramah that examines how this experience, vis-a-vis biography and anecdote, informs transformations in poetic forms indigenous to the Arabic language. Using optical character recognition and text analysis software, Rawad is compiling a digital archive of poetry collections central to his research to facilitate analysis of linguistic, stylistic, and formal patterns to explore new methods of close and distant reading. Rawad earned two MA degrees in Arabic from the University of Texas at Austin (2017) and the University of California, Los Angeles (2013). He was awarded a fellowship for the Center of Arabic Study Abroad (2014) in Amman, Jordan. Rawad received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Dissertation Abroad Request (2021), Janet Lee Stevens Award in Arabic and Islamic Studies (2020) and was named a Mellon Graduate Fellow (2019). Also, he was nominated for the Texas Foreign Language Teaching Excellence Award (2017). His translations of Arabic poetry and literature appear in publications by Michigan Quarterly Review, Paris Review (forthcoming), Two Lines Press, DoubleSpeak, Words Without Borders, and Inventory.