Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology and History
About
Israa Khalifa is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology and History Joint Program at the University of Michigan. Her academic research is focused on critical social theory with particular attention to abstraction and (in)commensuration to shed light on the reflections on the role of science in racialization and citizenship under capitalist modernity. Her doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled Citizenship in the Shadows of Slavery and Race Science: Noncitizens, Genetics, and Governance in the Arabian Gulf since the 1920s, is a critique of Western capitalist epistemologies through a historicization of the emergence of the non-citizen as a category and the role science and technology plays in racial capitalist governance in the Arab world.
She is also working on the history of the early twentieth-century intellectual Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi, examining how his writings illuminate the intersections of racial ideology, natural religion, and science, as well as the circulation and translation of ideas, processes of scientific standardization, and the development of scientific and literary ideologies in Egypt at the turn of the century.
Somewhere in a parallel dimension, Israa is a neophyte children’s story writer.
Research interests: Critical social theory; real abstraction; (in)commensurability; capitalism; science and technology; genomics; race; slavery; citizenship; Middle East.
Teaching:
2026 HP 241: Philosophy of Mind through Westworld w/Prof. George Hoffmann
2025 STS 285: Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society w/Prof. John Carson
2024 HIST 241: American Wars: Cold War to the 21st Century w/Prof. Juan Cole
2024 STS 285: Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society w/Prof. John Carson
2023 ANTH 101: Introduction to Four Field Anthropology
