COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Youssef is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University with a home department in Spanish and Portuguese. He holds a B.A from Amherst College where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a self-designed major in Comparative Literature.

His main scholarly interests revolve around youth cultures in Europe and the Arab world, linguistic exchanges and hybridity in North Africa, new media and the digital age, literature and cinema of the banlieue, as well as postcolonial theory. As a translator, he has co-authored an article that included his new French rendition of Borges' "Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote'' for Translation Review and a Darija version of "Borges and I'' for Panorapost.com.

In the film industry, Youssef has worked in Film and TV development for international production companies based in Casablanca, New York, Cairo, and Washington DC. He was a United Talent Agency extern in the spring of 2022. He is currently at work on his first feature documentary film "Moroccan Roll", as a writer/director, produced by Nabil Ayouch and 2M TV, for which he is a Meditalents 2022 Lab Doc Resident. 

Youssef has given guest lectures about Moroccan cinema, skateboarding and youth cultures at Amherst College and for the Dartmouth College Arabic program in Morocco. He is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Northwestern, an Amherst Memorial Fellow, and fluently speaks French, Spanish, English, Italian and Moroccan Darija.