Maurice Pomerantz is a scholar of classical Arabic literature whose research considers the power of ornate language and rhetoric as instruments of persuasion and critique in the Abbasid period. His work centers on the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī, on which he has published a monograph and numerous articles, much of it collaborative. He holds a bachelor's degree in classics and religion and a doctor of philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he worked under Wadad Kadi on the chancery correspondence of the fourth/tenth-century vizier and adīb al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād. Pomerantz joined New York University's Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2008 and New York University Abu Dhabi in 2013, where he served as professor of literature and Arab Crossroads studies and, most recently, as executive director of the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute. He has held a Mellon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and Fulbright fellowships in Jordan and Lebanon, and serves on the editorial boards of numerous prominent book series and journals.