My research has recently focused on migration, cross-cultural encounters and literature. My doctoral thesis, Affective Geographies: Borders, Home, Belonging and Futurity in Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi Exile Literature, explored how literature makes knowable the complex textures of displacement often elided by academic research (including ethnographic). I argued for the significance and subversive potential of literature and the ways in which literary and cultural narratives (whether novels, poetry or autobiographies) can challenge official and abstracted discourses on refugees.
My current postdoctoral research project is on writing new Gulf regional histories through the photographs of Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Mubarak bin London مُبَارَك بِن لَنْدَن, sponsored by the National Library and Archives of the United Arab Emirates.
