PROFILE
Stephen Sheehi (Michigan, MA, PhD, Temple, BA; pronouns he/his/his) is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of Arab Studies at William and Mary. He is a joint appointment in the Program of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) and the Arabic Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and a core faculty member of the Asian & Pacific-Islander American Studies Program (APIA).
Prof. Sheehi is also Founding Faculty Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William and Mary, which seeks to validate, elevate and learn from knowledge practices, and creative expressions of communities of color, natives and displaced peoples and marginalized identities.
Prof. Sheehi’s work examines cultural, intellectual, art history, and the political economy of the Middle East, with a special emphasis on the late Ottoman Empire and the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-‘arabiyah). His research and written commentaries have also examined photography, psychoanalysis, minorities in the Middle East, Islamophobia in the United States and contemporary issues of the Middle East and North America. In addition to Middle Eastern studies and Islamophobia, he has had a life-time engagement with Arab and Muslim American issues, globalization and economic equity, transformative education, and social justice. He remains interested in and a perennial student of decolonial theory and praxis, psychoanalysis, and cultural and poststructural theory.
Prof. Sheehi is the author of five books; most recently, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) co-authored with Dr. Lara Sheehi and Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine written with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar (University of California Press, 2022) as well as The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016); Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Clarity Press, 2011), which has been translated into Arabic as al-Islamofobia: al-Hamlah al-idiulujiyah dud al-Muslimin translation by Fatimah Nasr (Cairo: Dar al-Sutour, 2012); and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (University Press of Florida, 2004).
Prof. Sheehi has published in a variety of venues on Middle Eastern photography, art, literature, and intellectual history in venues such as Psychoanalysis and History, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Psychoanalytic Perspective, British Art Studies, Alif, Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, Third Text, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The British Journal of Middle East Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Discourse, The Journal of Arabic Literature, Ibraaz, Critique, Jouvert, The Journal of Comparative South Asian, African, Middle Eastern Studies and Encyclopedia of Islam along with publishing commentary in Common Dreams , Mondoweiss, Jadaliyya, and al-Adab. He is also advisory board member of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World, Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, and Regards: Revue des arts du spectacle as well as the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network. He has lectured nationally and internationally including at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul, and the Library of Congress.