she, her, her, hers, herself
Humanities Division
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Humanities Building 1
428
Humanities Academic Services
My current book project, tentatively (re)titled "Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab," explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across twentieth century North Africa and Europe.
I am particularly interested in how variable and contested articulations of blackness - from the Atlantic, Saharan, Mediterranean, and Nile worlds - are realised, reformed, resisted, and reimagined across anglophone, francophone, and arabophone cultural and political spheres. I approach this research by taking up a familiar canon of Black transnational narrative, festival, and sonic cultures, and rendering it unfamiliar by drawing upon its translations (and receptions) in other diasporic contexts: in particular, in and through Afro-Arab space(s).
In relation and addition to this ongoing work, my teaching and research interests include African diasporic cultural politics and culture work, particularly in and of liberation movements; memory studies; literature, visual arts, and poetics of disaster, particularly in relation to Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora; nationalism and statelessness; representations of war in graphic novels and film; the intersections of race, colonialism, and sport; and Third Worldism.
Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, I was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
2024 Teaching Excellence Award, Phi Beta Kappa NorCal Association
2024-2025 UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop
2025 Hellman Fellowship
2025 UCSC THI Faculty Research Fellowship
In the Sound program (curated by Sónia Vaz Borges and Léopold Lambert) of Greenhouse, Portugal Pavilion (curated by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, and Vânia Gala), 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia 2024: "The 'No-State' Solution: Power of Imagination for the Palestinian Struggle," originally recorded with The Archipelago (now The Funambulist podcast) in Los Angeles, April 27, 2014
"We May Never Return Again (A Celebration of Our Aliveness)." The Funambulist no. 58, "Return/العودة/Le Retour/El Retorno" (March-April 2025), 24-27.
"Mapping the 'Arab' in Pan-African Political Cultures." Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. Eds. Antawan I Byrd, Elvira Dyangasi Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky. Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 2025. 294-305.
"It Turns Out We Were Not All Pan-African During the World Cup." The Funambulist no. 46, "Questioning our Solidarities." (March-April 2023), 72-79.
“Pan-African Performance and Possibility: Lessons from Algiers 1969.” The Funambulist no. 32, “Pan-Africanism.” (November-December 2020), 28-33.
Epilogue: “From Antigua to Algérie: The Particularity and Promise of the Afro-Arab.” Post45 Contemporaries, cluster on “Extraordinary Renditions,” edited by Kalyan Nadiminti. 11 September, 2020.
“Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness.” Research in African Literatures, 50, no. 3 (Fall 2019), 91-115.
“Who will we be when we are free? On Palestine and Futurity.” The Funambulist no. 24, “Futurisms.” (July-August 2019), 22-27.
"The 'No-State Solution': Decolonizing Palestine Beyond the West Bank and East-Jerusalem." The Funambulist no. 10, "Architecture & Colonialism." (March-April 2017), 46-51.
"Campus Uproar: A Conversation with Zach Samalin and Sophia Azeb," Open Source with Christopher Lydon, WBUR (May 9, 2024)