Rabab Abdulhadi
PhD, Senior Scholar, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies.
Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SF STATE, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received her BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Special Honors Curriculum, Sociology and Women’s Studies from Hunter College in New York and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University. A co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, she co-authored Mobilizing Democracy: Changing US Policy in the Middle East, and co-editor Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 Evelyn Shakir National Arab American non-fiction Book Award, and a special issue of MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies special issue on gender, nation and belonging (2005).Her work has appeared in Al-Shabaka; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; Journal of Women's History; Taiba: Women and Cultural Discourses; Cuadernos Metodologicos: Estudio de Casos; This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; and several Arabic language publications, such as Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah. Dr. Abdulhadi profile.
Omar Zahzah
Assistant Professor of AMED Studies
Omar Zahzah is an Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies (AMED) in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State University. Dr. Zahzah holds a B.A. in Comparative World Literature and Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach, and an M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.
A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Dr. Zahzah is the former Education and Advocacy Coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine has been an organizer for Palestinian liberation for many years.
His current research focuses on how Black, Arab American and Palestinian creatives utilize cultural means of resisting converging projects of securitization as well as globalizing paradigms of racialized policing and surveillance. Dr. Zahzah’s broader research interests include Arab American Studies, Black studies, American Studies, cultural studies, Palestine, the War on Terror, surveillance, the critical sociology of policing, national liberation, counter-insurgency/pacification, post-colonial studies, Indigenous studies, settler-colonialism, resistance literatures, institutional cooptation of radical movements, and cross-movement solidarity.
Dr. Zahzah’s academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from journals such as Arab Studies Quarterly and collections such as Centering the Margins: Reimagining the Field of Arab American Studies. He is also a creative writer and freelance journalist.
Dr. Zahzah’s book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle is forthcoming from the Censored Press in Fall 2024, and he is currently at work on a monograph based on his dissertation, Undercover and Hyper-Visible: Security Poetics and Pacification Prosaics in African American and Arab American Literature.