My research traces Palestinian subjectivity within critical discourses of the human and its other, linking it to the philosophical and psychoanalytic development of the concepts of alienation and exile, along with their premodern imaginaries. I am currently working on two interconnected book projects which bring together components of postcolonial studies, Black studies, native studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theology, to posit a novel mode of understanding the many partialities that shape the Palestinian subject—viewed as the prototypical native, abstracted and reduced to fragments (linguistic, archaeological, biblical, political)—and, in turn, forming it as a racialized global figure. Alienation (in philosophy and psychoanalysis) and exile (in Saidian thought) are central to this study, as I interrogate how these concepts and their postwar reconfigurations contribute to the erasure of the Palestinian subject in certain strands of contemporary critical discourses and literatures, particularly within the anti-colonial emphasis of Palestinian studies and Jewish studies.
My former training in critical human geography and architecture informs the methodological and spatial approach to my study and teaching of the question of Palestine, offering a venue to recover Palestinian subjectivity by giving it a developed presence in contemporary critical scholarship and debates. This work constitutes part of my broader interest in placing the Palestinian as a partial figure—as Alien, on the outside of human potential and status—interrogating its interconnections with other besieged and subjugated identities, and recasting how these identities overlap and diverge within the psycho-politics of race, the material and ideal domains of culture and civilization, and in relation to violence, domination, and the systems of coloniality and enslavement. Approaching the Palestinian subject in this way allows for a rethinking of the ongoing power of philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses to shape contemporary critical thought, particularly notions of home, belonging, and alterity, and the intersection of these notions with nationalism and identity formation.
Before joining the Department of Rhetoric, I was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at UC, Riverside (2023–25). My work has appeared in Atlantic Studies, and Psychoanalysis and History, with forthcoming publications in Qui Parle, and Critical Times.
Education:
M.A., Ph.D. Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine.
M.S. Geography, Urban & Environmental Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
B.S., M.S. Architecture, University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy.
