Ammar Farra is a first-year Ph.D. student in classical Arabic literature. He is currently working on the commentary (sharḥ) and gloss (ḥāshiya) traditions in Arabic and Persian literatures and their interaction with the process of canon-formation. More broadly, he is interested in Islamic intellectual history, Arabic and Persian grammar and philology, pre-Islamic poetry, and history of the book.
He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago, where, after taking courses on Arabic and Persian literature and Islamic intellectual history, he wrote a thesis titled “Beyond Sectarianism: Commentarial Practice as Polemics on Knowledge in the Commentaries of al-Rāwandī and Ibn Abī al-Ḥadīd on Nahj al-Balāgha.” In it, he examined commentarial polemics as a reflection of larger debates on knowledge and its conception. Before that, he received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, with his thesis focused on the construction of the Prophetic Medicine (Ṭibb al-Nabawī) genre through its entanglement with hadith, Islamic law, and theology.