Principal Faculty

Biography, Education and Training

I received my Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin, where I trained in transnational American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and comparative colonialisms. My research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. My first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that draws from archival research on past and present delegations to Palestine and ethnogrpahic research I completed as a 2012-2013 and 2019-2020 Palestinian American Research Center Fellow. In Invited to Witness, I argue that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a localized political strategy, and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to the region by extending deliberately truncated invitations to international tourists to come to Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. Taking as my subject a phenomenon that is too often relegated to one side of a “good tourism/bad tourism” binary, I instead analyze the complex ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. My next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, an edited volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press that considers how Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora assert their connection(s) to their homeland--often via initiatives that resemble tourism.

Honors, Awards and Grants

The Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities, Humanities Division (2022-2023)

Faculty Public Humanities, Digital, and Community-Engaged Research Fellowship, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute (2022-2023)

Faculty Research Grant, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, Committee on Research, University of California, Santa Cruz (2021-2022)

Research Cluster Award (with Camilla Hawthorne), “Borders Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective,” The Humanities Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz (2020-2021)  

Hellman Fellowship, Academic Affairs Division, University of California, Santa Cruz (2020-2021)  

Innovative Mentoring Grant for Untenured Faculty, Project: First Book Writing Group, Committee on Career Advising, University of California, Santa Cruz (2020-2021)  

Book Subvention Grant, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz (2020-2021)

Faculty Research Grant, In Solidarity: Decolonial Tourism in a Transnational Context, Committee on Research, University of California, Santa Cruz (2019-2020)

University of California President's Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities, University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) (2019-2020)

Palestinian American Research Center Field-Based Research Fellowship (PARC) (2019-2020)

Short-Term Collaborative Research Residency Grant (with Camilla Hawthorne), “Borders Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective,” University of California Humanities Research Institute (2019-2020)

New Faculty Research Grant, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine, Committee on Research, University of California, Santa Cruz (2018-2019)

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2017-2018)

University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (2015-2017)

Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin (2014-2015)

Palestinian American Research Center Field-Based Research Fellowship (PARC) (2012-2013)

Selected Publications

Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).

“Pinkwashing, Tourism, and Israeli State Violence,” Q & A: Queer in Asian America 2.0, ed.s Kale B. Fajardo, Alice Y. Hom, and Martin F. Manalansan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, July 2021). 

Special Issue: Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective, co-edited with Camilla Hawthorne, Critical Ethnic Studies, Volume 6, Issue 2 (Fall 2021).

“Subjection and Performance: Tourism, Witnessing, and Acts of Refusal in Palestine,” Feminist Formations, Volume 32, Issue 2 (Summer 2020): 79-110.

“Israeli Gay Tourist Initiatives and the (In)Visibility of State Violence,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 26, Number 1 (January 2020): 160-173.

“Technologies of Empire and the Rejection of Warfare’s Refrains,” Review of Inderpal Grewal’s Saving the Security State (2017), Caren Kaplan’s Aerial Aftermaths (2018), Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan’s edited volume Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017), and Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to War (2017), Radical History Review, Issue 133 (January 2019): 163-176.

“Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Solidarity in Occupied Palestine,” American Quarterly, Volume 68, Issue 3 (September 2016): 723-745.

“Locating Palestine within American Studies: Transitory Field Sites and Borrowed Methods,” Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South, eds. Shalini Puri and Debra Castillo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 97-110. 

Selected Recordings

New Books Network Podcast, New Books in Anthropology, Interview with Fulya Pinar, April 9, 2023.

Ideas on Fire Imagine Otherwise Podcast, Interview with Cathy Hannabach, January 11, 2023.

Tourism Geographies Podcast, Interview with Mary Mostafanezhad, January 19, 2023.