Academic Research
I hold a Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research examines contemporary queer time-based media from the Middle East through an interdisciplinary approach using film and media studies, Middle Eastern studies, queer theory, and ethnography. My dissertation, titled Queer Film and Art Practice from Lebanon: New Political Imaginaries, Radical Aesthetics, and Utopian Futures, demonstrates that queer artists from Lebanon and its diasporas have forged a unique queer imaginary drawing on local and regional cultures, histories, and archives while adopting, contesting, and reimagining western references. I argue that queer film and artworks from Lebanon, a hub for queer art production in the Arab world, help us understand Arab queer subjectivities in new complex ways, and not merely as Western-influenced forms of self-expression in a so-called homophobic Middle East. The originality of my research is that it reveals the centrality of these diverse genres of works—documentary, experimental, and fiction films as well as short videos posted on social media platforms—in overhauling socio-political and cultural systems by providing alternative and speculative visions.
In 2022/2023, I was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multicampus cluster project funded by UCHRI that I co-led in 2021/2022 and that included a group of nine historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and film and media scholars from four University of California campuses that share a personal and academic engagement with the Middle East. It is a project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East.
The end of 2020 marked ten years since the spark of the Arab Spring. Over these years of uprisings against authoritarian regimes, people have continued to face upheaval and crises across the Middle East: from ongoing wars and conflicts, increased repression, and new forms of fundamentalist militarism, to economic collapse. But beyond this prevalent story of instability and turmoil lie other narratives, dreams, affects, and movements. This multi-disciplinary research cluster draws from feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to challenge totalizing historical views of upheaval in the Middle East and investigate the unseen and generative traces of long-term change, imaginations, and modes of becoming ushered in by Arab uprisings. By exploring everyday affects, hidden forms of resistance, uncharted physical and symbolic mobilities, and counter-cultures/narratives, we propose alternative readings and mappings of the Middle East that attend to the “elsewheres” of upheaval. In this endeavor, we collaboratively rethink and re-theorize conceptual frameworks of both upheaval and the Middle East, and create an ongoing public archive that attends to concealed affective modes, and to hidden or erased presents and histories in a geopolitically charged region of the world.
Learn more about the project in this Foundry interview with Ingy Higazy and Raed Rafei and listen to a podcast about it.