Sam Wilder received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2019, with a dissertation that studied Arabic love poetry from the Umayyad period in its historical and political context. From 2015-2018 he was a contributing researcher to the research project Aristotle's Poetics in the West (of India) at the Freie Universität, Berlin, followed by a post-doc position at the same university. His research concerns Arabic classical literature and the history of its social construction and reception, with a current focus on poetry, science and the occult in the 11th-13th centuries CE. He has also translated several books from German and Arabic; his most recent translation, Where the Bird Disappeared by Ghassan Zaqtan, received the 2019 Palestine Book Award.