Research Interests

The medicine-politics nexus; medical expertise; medicine and gender; medicine and colonialism; graphic medicine; critical visual STS

Bio

I received a PhD in Political Theory from Sciences Po Paris in 2012. I received a BA in Political Science from Cairo University in 2004.

Trained in political theory and intellectual history, I work on the question of justice at the intersection of history, political theory, and STS. Growing up in Cairo, surrounded by both medicine and political activism, I later became interested in understanding how medical professionals’ political leanings shape their medical practice and how their medical expertise and practice shape, in turn, their political and social choices. I also became particularly interested in gender studies and postcolonial studies. After receiving a BA from Cairo University, I went on to do my graduate studies
in France (Sciences Po Paris) and conducted research in Italy and Germany. Before teaching at Hopkins, I taught at Harvard’s Department of the History of Science between 2011 and 2021.

With a focus on medicine and public health, my research addresses the questions of health and social justice, biomedical ethics, and the medicine-politics nexus, with a geographical focus on the Middle East and a special interest in postcolonial and gender studies. My research interests focus on medical expertise and how it is deployed in different political contexts. In this framework, I focus on gender and race as important contributors to the fashioning of the medical profession and as key
determinants of health and access to medical care. I am currently finishing a book manuscript (co-authored with Sherine Hamdy, UC Irvine, in preparation with Stanford University Press) on the roles played by doctors in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt and working on another book project on the social roles of doctors in postcolonial Egypt.

I am the Director of Fellowships at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, editor of the Journal of Middle East  Women’s Studies (JMEWS), associate editor of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS), and co-editor of Tendon magazine.