I am an Assistant Professor of Media and Culture affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis as well as the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, I was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the recipient of a Marie Curie Global Fellowship supported by the University of Melbourne. 

I am a theorist of visual culture working across the fields of Fashion Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies. My interdisciplinary research looks at how fashion has been used in various historical contexts to shape spaces of political expression and community formation. I am especially interested in how fashion practices (such as design, photography, and film) can function as forms of critique that destabilize colonial, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist systems, and ultimately carve out alternative aesthetic imaginaries. I am currently completing my first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine (solicited by University of California Press). My next research project is Crossdressed: Fashion and Beauty at the Edge of Politics (working title), which examines transvestite practices within and at the margins of political movements in the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe.

My research has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Third Text, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, Feminist Media Histories, Australian Feminist Studies, and Fashion Theory. I am the co-editor of Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023) and of two special journal issues: one on transgender representation, for Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, and one on fashion in global media cultures, for Feminist Media Histories. 

I am a regular reviewer for top-tier journals in gender and sexuality studies and media studies, and am an active member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS, Middle East caucus) as well as the College Art Association (CAA).

In the Media Studies department, my courses cover a range of topics, including: global media cultures; fashion, media and identity; popular culture in the Middle East; and queer visual culture. I welcome enquiries from graduate students with interests in dress and politics, Arabic media and popular culture, beauty cultures, and/or queer aesthetics.