Samera Esmeir

Samera Esmeir’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of legal history and legal thought, political theory, Middle East studies, Islamic studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and critical theory. She’s interested in diagnosing the limits that the liberal-secular tradition sets on thought and in cultivating attunement to this tradition's outside or to the grammars of life, law, and politics at its edge. Her first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford University Press, 2012), is a historical study of the powers of modern law in colonial Egypt and a theoretical work on the figuration of the human in liberal-juridical colonial grammars, the violence of juridical humanization, what it means to bind the human to state law, and paths of politics and freedom outside juridical humanity.  

Meanwhile, Palestine is Esmeir’s second manuscript, through which she identifies a modality of power distinct from the sovereign and the biopolitical: the power to obliterate, whose ambition is to make disappear. Simultaneously, Esmeir approaches the Palestinian form of life in struggle before the projected future of vanishment, attuning to the capacity to absorb destruction without neutralizing it while heightening the struggle of the narrow times.  

Esmeir’s third manuscript in progress is titled The Struggle that Remains: Between World and International. Thinking from Palestine’s revolutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book tracks the modern entry of the word "international" into the English language; theorizes its emergence as a contending signifier of the world (in legal and political discourse); tracks its territorialization of the earth; explores its reconfiguration of horizons of revolution, in particular in how it has contributed to shifting the relationship between war and revolution; and probes the struggle that remains in excess.  

From 2019 to 2024, Esmeir served as the editor-in-chief of the newly founded journal, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory (published by Duke University Press). In that capacity, she edited and published works at the edge of the critical theory canon to bring into focus—and conversation—other non-Western traditions of thought and critical practice. She continues to be involved with the journal as a member of its editorial collective.

Esmeir received numerous awards, including from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Mellon Foundation New Directions Program, the ACLS, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Along with Natalia Brizuela, she was the co-PI of a campus Mellon Foundation grant supporting the activities of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2020-2024).