Stephen Sheehi

Stephen Sheehi (MA, PhD, Michigan, he/him/هو) is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies. He holds a joint appointment as Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Program of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) as well as a core member of the Asian and Pacific-Islander American Studies Program (APIA). He is also the Faculty Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project.

Prof. Sheehi specializes in psychoanalysis, photography, gender, sexuality, race and social history of the modern Arab world, starting with the late Ottoman Empire and the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-‘arabiyah). He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and commentaries that locate the interplay between psychoanalysis, photography, coloniality and decoloniality within Arab modernity, racial capitalism, colonialism and settler-colonialism. He maintains a particular interest in Palestine and Lebanon as well as issues of race, gender/sexuality and class with the Arab and Muslim diasporas in the country now known as the United States.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine co-authored with Dr. Lara Sheehi, examines how psychoanalysis is itself used by mental health practitioners throughout Palestine to navigate not only Zionist settler colonialism and Israeli-Apartheid, but also to imagine new possibilities for Palestinian subjectivity and liberation. The book explores how psychoanalysis is re-tooled and deployed by indigenous clinicians within the context of Palestinian life and resistance to provide a clinical and theoretical framework for meaning making of the experiences of Palestinians, who live, die, and resist under the conditions of Zionist settler colonialism, military occupation and Apartheid. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation won the 2022 Palestine Book Award.

Prof. Sheehi also published Camera Palaestina: Palestine and Displaced Histories of Palestine, along with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar. Examining seven photography albums of Palestinian bureaucrat-musician Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Sheehi locates the history of photography in Palestine within the material and social history of Palestinians, who were defining their national identity and recalibrating social structures, and class and gender hierarchies under British colonial rule and Zionist colonization. In Camera Palaestina, Sheehi demonstrates how the photographic archive, including Orientalist images re-claimed by Palestinians themselves, galvanize into an unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience that constitutes an incontestable continuum of what is Arab Palestine, from its living past to its living present.

The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) investigates the relationship between indigenous photography, social transformations and the creation of modern Arab society in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine before World War One. Sheehi examines the social “work” portraits assume in stabilizing capitalist modernity and modern class, national and gendered subjectivities in the Arab world.

Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011) is among the first books to comprehensively examine the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the United States. Sheehi shows how Islamophobia is an ideological and fluid political formation that transforms anti-Arab racism into a larger political program that serves US empire abroad as well as is used to regulate dissent domestically. (The book has been translated into Arabic as al-Islamufobia: al-Hamlah al-idiulujiyah dud al-Muslimin translation by Fatimah Nasr (Cairo: Dar al-Sutour, 2012).

His first book, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (University of Florida, 2004) examines how intellectuals of the “Arab Renaissance” or al-nahdah al-`arabiyah articulated new forms of Arab subjectivity within the context of epistemological shifts that would constitute Arab modernity. Sheehi tracks, what now would be called, the coloniality of knowledge structured into Arab modernity. Prof. Sheehi’s current projects also include Intimacies of Guerillas: Partisans, Photography and Revolutionary Desires (in progress) and The People’s History of the Maronites (in progress).

Most recently, Prof. Sheehi has co-edited with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian State Violence, Settler-Colonialism, and Abolition., special edited issue of Journal of State Crime (Vol. 12 (2), 2024.

He is also a board member of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World, Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, and Regards – Revue des arts du spectacle.