Research Interests
Research Agenda
I position my research agenda at the intersections of Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Environmental Humanities, drawing heavily from the traditions of transnational feminisms, queer-of-color critique, critical race theory, and indigenous poetics. Broadly speaking, I engage with modern and contemporary literary and cultural productions of the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporas to investigate ecological, ideological, and existential states of crisis, as well as alternative modes of (im)possible imaginings.
Doctoral Research
My research considers the abstract and material implications of the advent of the petroleum era on the construction of the human(nonhuman) subject in the modern nation-states of the Arabian Peninsula. My dissertation project, titled Oil Heirs and Petro-Queers: Subject-Formation Under Hydrocarbon Rule in Arabian Peninsular Literatures, centers the narratives of indigenous Bedouin populations, stateless communities, and migrant workers, among others, and proposes the term “petro-queer” to negotiate the necropolitical topographies of the peninsula.
Future Research
My long-term research trajectory brings the concerns of posthumanism, Anthropocene studies, and religious studies to the Arab-Islamicate world. In conversation with the traditions of ecotheology and Islamic environmentalism, my future research places in dialogue the principles of Islamic environmentalism and the aesthetic practices of Arab Futurism and Gulf Futurism. In doing so, I assert the formal, critical, and conceptual vocabularies of theological environmentalism as vital to the decolonial aspirations of Arab Futurism.