I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville whose focus is political theory. My research and teaching span incarceration, surveillance, settler colonialism, and subject formation. In particular, my research looks at sites of extremely unbalanced power relations such as prisons, surveillance, and settler colonialism, to analyze how political subjects are made and unmade in these contexts.

I received my PhD from the University of Minnesota Political Science Department. I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa and an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. My work has appeared in top-tier journals like Contemporary Political Theory and Constellations.

My first book manuscript, Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom, explores the Israeli incarceration and torture of Palestinian political prisoners since Israel’s founding in 1948 until 2023 as a multi-layered site of subject formation. The manuscript builds on archival documents and interviews to trace Israeli attempts of affecting the prisoners’ identity, behavior, and sense of self as well as the prisoners’ resistance to such attempts. It asks: What can we learn from prisoners’ transcendence over carceral subjectification toward their own counter-subjectivation—and from their failures—for the purpose of expanding freedom in darkening times? Just as Freud analyzed psychoses to better grasp the psyche, this project studies prisons to better understand politics.