About

HIDDEN CITIES is a blog of stories from the Middle East written by Frederick Deknatel. It began in the fall of 2008, at the start a Fulbright fellowship in Syria.

I’m now the Executive Editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), which was founded by the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I was previously the Managing Editor of World Politics Review from 2017 to 2021, and have also been a Staff Editor at Foreign Affairs. My writing and reporting on the Middle East have appeared in The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The National, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. My chapter on reconstruction in Syria was recently published in Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, edited by James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss and published by the Getty. My writing has also been anthologized in Out of Practice, a collection of the first ten issues of the wonderful but short-lived Even Magazine (once called “the old-school-by-young-people smarty-pants art journal”). In 2008 and 2009, I was a Fulbright fellow in Syria, where I also worked for the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. I have an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College at Oxford and a B.A. in history and Arabic from Vassar.

You can reach me at frederickdeknatel at gmail dot com. Or visit frederickdeknatel.com.