I work across art and graphic design history, specialising in the visual and cultural politics of the modern Arab world. My research engages with historical processes of decolonisation and anticolonial solidarity, alongside broader interests in rethinking modernism beyond the Western canon.

My most recent project, Decolonizing the Page: A Forgotten Golden Age of Arabic Book Arts (1950s–80s) (www.decolonizingthepage.com), is an online exhibition and archival resource that sheds light on a remarkable era when Arabic book arts flourished, capturing the artistic, political, and intellectual fervour of decolonisation. Featuring around 250 books, the exhibition reveals how the aesthetic and political concerns of a generation of Arab artists and graphic designers transformed the Arabic book in its content, form, and very conception.
The project was developed with support from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC–UK) Fellowship, in partnership with the British Library, and in collaboration with the collections of Abboudi Bou Jawde (Al-Furat Bookshop, Beirut) and Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi (The Azzawi Archives, London).

My second monograph, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (Cambridge University Press 2020), examines the intersections of visual culture, design, and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. It analyses a global conjuncture in Lebanon’s cultural history shaped by anticolonial struggle and the Cold War, uncovering the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist practices. Drawing on previously unexamined archives of everyday print media, the book traces the work of Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian artists who moved through Beirut’s art, publishing, and political scenes.
Cosmopolitan Radicalism was awarded a Design History Society Research Publication Grant (2019) and was co-winner of the 2021 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize, as well as the co-winner of the 2022 Middle East Librarians Association Book Awards.

Building on this research, I co-edited (with Cathy Bergin and Francesca Burke) Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties (Manchester University Press, 2022), which brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on the cultural politics of the global sixties. I also convened the conference The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity (2019), alongside related panels exploring transnational cultural and political networks.

My first monograph, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2009), investigated the intersections of visual culture and political conflict. This research was extended into the exhibition Signs of Conflict, which travelled internationally, and a bilingual (Arabic and English) digital archive (https://signsofconflict.com/) that brings together the project’s outputs.