I work across the fields of art and design history, with specialism in the visual and cultural politics of the postcolonial Arab world and broader interest in historical conditions of modernity and (post)coloniality in the Global South.

I began examining the intersections of visual culture and political conflict in my first monograph, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (IB Tauris 2009). Building on this study, I have curated a related exhibition, Signs of Conflict, which travelled from Beirut to a number of locations; and have folded the various outputs of this project into a bilingual (Arabic and English) online archival resource, http://www.signsofconflict.com.

My second monograph, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (Cambridge University Press 2020), explores the intersections of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. It critically examines a global conjuncture in Lebanon’s political and cultural history, marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a Cold War order. In particular, Cosmopolitan Radicalism uncovers the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits and sheds light on the forgotten trajectories and graphic design practices of its protagonists: Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian artists who wove through Beirut, in and out of its flourishing art galleries, publishing industry and political movements. Drawing on uncharted archives of everyday print media, the book reveals the translocal visuality that emerged with—and, crucially, shaped—Beirut’s development as a nodal city in the global sixties. Decentring both Western and nation-based frameworks, Cosmopolitan Radicalism offers usable methodologies for global art and design historiography and contributes directly to decolonising these fields of study.
Cosmopolitan Radicalism was awarded a Design History Society Research Publication Grant in 2019 and is the co-winner of the 2021 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize for the best scholarly work in Middle Eastern Studies published in English in that year.

I have since extended my research to collaborative and interdisciplinary lines of enquiry on the cultural politics of the Global Sixties, convening related panels as well as a major conference, ‘The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity’ (June 2019); and co-edited, with Cathy Bergin and Francesca Burke, Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties (Manchester University Press 2022).

My new AHRC-funded project, ‘Decolonising the Page: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Arabic Publications’, investigates the significant but understudied political role of graphic design and visual culture during processes of decolonisation and anti-imperialist liberation struggles from the 1950s to the 1980s. Focussed on postcolonial Arabic publications, the study is concerned with how their design, visuality and materiality helped articulate political imaginaries, mobilize cross-border anticolonial solidarities and shape new aesthetic sensibilities. While shedding light on the modern Arab world, this project also draws comparisons with shared historical conditions of modernity and (post)coloniality in the Global South. ‘Decolonising the Page’ will build collaborative research networks and produce academic and creative curatorial outputs as well as digital humanities resources.