My research traces the question of Palestine within critical discourses of the human and its other, linking it to the philosophical and psychoanalytic development of the concepts of alienation and exile. My forthcoming manuscript Palestine, and the Future of Home brings together components of postcolonial studies, Black studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, architecture, and theology to posit a novel mode of examining the many partialities that shape the Palestinian positionality within critical thought—abstracted and reduced to fragments: linguistic, archaeological, biblical, political. Alienation (in philosophy and psychoanalysis) and exile (in Saidian thought) are central to this study, as I interrogate how these concepts, their premodern imaginaries and postwar reconfigurations, contribute to the obfuscation of the Palestinian as Alien, veered to the outside of human potential and status.
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 reimagine the contours of the question, by giving it a developed presence in humanist, emancipatory, and anticolonial strands of contemporary critical discourses and literatures. This work constitutes part of my broader interest in interrogating how different forms of subjugation 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 question of Palestine 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.
