NAZAR 2025 Speaker Series

Maryam Kashani’s work explores the relationships between physical landscapes and the sociopolitical, material, and spiritual histories and forces that emerge with and against them, with a particular focus on collective study and struggle. Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival, is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Kashani is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and is in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments, and other forms yet to be determined. Rasheed is the author of seven artists’ books, and is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her books include: The Jewelers of the Ummah; Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism; Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography; The Civil Contract of Photography; Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography; and The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River. Among her potential histories, archives and curatorial work were shown recently including: The Natural History of Rape at the Berlin Biennal in 2022; Errata at Tapiès Foundation and HKW in Berlin in 2019 and 2020.

Kimberly Juanita Brown serves as the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the Black diaspora and visual culture studies. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015), and Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024). Brown is currently completing her third book, Black Elegies, about the art of mourning in contemporary cultural productions. She is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color scholars, artists, and curators whose work examines critical race theory and visual culture studies. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing.

Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work is committed to decolonial and feminist methodologies and is especially interested in psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionist studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39) and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press, 2026).

Stephen Sheehi is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program and  the Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at the College of William & Mary. Having published on psychoanalysis, Arab photography, Arab identity and colonial modernity,  and Islamophobia and racism, he is, most recently, co-author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine with Lara Sheehi, which has won the Palestine Book Award for Best 2022 Academic Book on Palestine; and Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories, co-authored with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar. He and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian most recently co-edited a special issue of State Crime Journal, “Settler-Colonialism As State-Crime: Abolitionist Perspectives.”