My research and writing focuses on the history of colonialism and anti-colonialism and their forms of knowledge. I am especially interested in South-South solidarity (especially in West and South Asia, and across Arabic and Urdu); the intellectual history of modern Palestine; the social history internationalism in the twentieth-century; and the history of the disciplines and area studies.
I have a particular interest in the history of knowledge and its relationship to the social, political, and economic history of higher education, universities, and ancillary institutions for the production, preservation, and publication of ideas (conferences, research centers, departments, “think tanks,” journals, magazines, archives, and libraries). I am interested in both colonial and anti-colonial intellectual formations from the nineteenth century to the present. To this end I have written about the history of area studies in the United States, the structure of denial in “postcolonial Zionism” and Israeli historiography generally, and (with Maya Wind) on the role of Zionism and Israel Studies in Western universities.
In my book, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization (University of California Press, 2025) and in a series of other articles, I have sought to account for the development of knowledge in West and South Asia—especially between West and South Asia—in the twentieth century. I am interested in what we might think of as the areas’s areas. For the World Humanities Report, I contributed an essay entitled “Arab Archives and Asian Histories,” which makes the case for writing histories of West Asia oriented to the East and the South. One area of current research is the history of the Arab university.
I am also interested in the history of displacement, exile, migration, and diaspora, especially the transnational history of the Palestinian people. On that score, I have written about the history of Palestinian Los Angeles, the life of Edward Said, and the global itineraries of Palestinians from Gaza. The life and work of Gaza’s poets and historians is the subject of my current book project (see my essays in Public Books and The Baffler).