Teaching
Film and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies
I am Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, where I teach courses on Arab cinema, contemporary visual culture, digital media, and questions of visuality and violence, witnessing and worldmaking, archives and fabulation, refusal and repair. I’ve previously taught courses in film/media studies, visual culture, and writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I give talks at universities, art schools, cultural organizations, and film festivals around the world and online.
Still from The Last Angel of History (dir. John Akomfrah, 1996)
Fall 2018 - Brown University - Visual Cultures of Repair and Resistance
This seminar will explore the poetics and politics of visual culture that engages war, colonialism, state violence, and the formation of intersecting race, gender, and class inequalities through processes of resistance, refusal, and repair. We will examine how images—from art works in galleries to music videos on YouTube to viral photos of street protests—shape the political imagination as they challenge historical narratives and archival silences, represent and refract contemporary realities, and speculate about possible futures. We will pay special attention to the politics of looking and being looked at, exposing and concealing, witnessing and failing to witness, through concepts such as “the right to look” (Mirzoeff) and “the right to opacity” (Glissant). We will also parse the meanings of “repair,” “refusal,” and “resistance” as modes of ethico-political engagement, distinguishing among varied approaches to socially committed image-making. As we consider a wide range of historical and political contexts, we will zoom in on a few primary loci: Afrofuturism and what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” in the “afterlife of slavery”; acts of witnessing and speculation in Palestine-Israel; and transnational resistance to surveillance, drone warfare, and global networks of control.