Announcement | Spring 2024 Arcapita Visiting Professor in Modern Arab Studies

MEI extends a warm welcome to Dr. Mohamed Abdou, the Spring 2024 Arcapita Visiting Professor in Modern Arab Studies!

Dr. Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. This upcoming year, he will be the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Inequalities, Identities, and Justice research team at Cornell University; he continues to be listed as an international affiliate scholar with Einaudi. His research stems from his involvement with the anti-globalization post-Seattle 1999 movements, the Tyendinaga Mohawks and the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, during the standoff over the Culbertson tract, as well as the anti-war protests of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. He is author of Islam & Anarchism: Relationships & Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). His scholarship and writings have appeared in the Journals of Political Theology, Settler-colonial,  Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies, Al-Raida as well as Feral Feminisms and Roar Magazine. He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival PhD dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary (2019).