I am a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Liberal Studies at New York University and hold a PhD in political theory and global politics from the New School for Social Research. I’ve also had the opportunity to teach in various other universities in NYC including The New School, Pratt Institute, and the City University of New York. Coming from a background of revolution, war, migration, and marginalization, I have been thinking about the problem of sociopolitical violence for most of my intellectual life. My research draws on the fields of political theory, gender studies, psychoanalysis, literature, Middle-Eastern studies, as well as international relations.  

In my current book project based on my dissertation, I study how some forms of feminism uncannily find themselves in alliance with alt-right and neoliberal politics. I am interested in how these feminist discourses are organized around the principle of identity and how feminist identity politics reproduce patriarchal and phallic forms of sovereign, capitalist, and biopolitical violence. To think about feminism beyond identity, I turn to psychoanalysis and ancient tragedy, particularly Sophocles’ Antigone and explore ways of dealing with traumatic loss that do not trap us in the masculinist politics of identity and enmity.

I’m also working on two upcoming projects. The first is a study of the relation between guilt and mass violence particularly in the political theories of Freud, Nietzsche, and Fanon where we find that both the repression and the expression of guilt can lead us to the unleashing of large-scale violence. I try to overcome these limitations with ways of living besides guilt through feminist psychoanalytic thought.

My second upcoming work is one that examines how critical concepts have become constitutive tools of imperial wars in the Middle East. This include feminist concepts such as ‘gender apartheid’, or decolonial and anti-imperial notions such as ‘internal colonization’ or ‘regional imperialism’. This project is an affective study of disavowal and displacement as mass psychological defenses that pave the way for wholesale domination and annihilation.

In the time that remains, I try and try again to nurture intimate bonds of love, friendship, and community, all too often failing, and sporadically arriving home in ek-stasis.