Stephen Sheehi (Michigan, MA, PhD, Temple, BA; pronouns he/his/him) 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 a perennial student of decolonial theory and praxis,  psychoanalysis, and cultural and poststructural theory.