Dr Kanwal Hameed

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of mid-20th century political movements in the Middle East and North Africa, and I focus on the modern history of the Gulf and its connections across multiple regions.

I received my PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) University of Exeter, UK, in June 2022, and have since been a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut (OIB), a Researcher on the Mapping Connections: China and the Middle East project at IAIS, University of Exeter, a teaching fellow at the SOAS Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Stuart Hall foundation RACE-Ed Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Interests

My research traces little-known social from the 20th century Gulf, centring the intersections of gender, class, nationality and race within anti-colonial struggles. I take a novel approach to the Gulf by foregrounding its entanglement within broader regional histories and its transnational connections, against the backdrop of the history of Empires. I engage with theory emergent from the anti-colonial context from the region, as well as from other disciplines to contribute to new ways of theorising the Gulf, political movements, and the era of decolonisation.

My research interests include anti-colonial histories and political movements of the modern Gulf and MENA regions, and historiography that attends to the intersecting axes of gender, class, ethno-sect, race and citizenship. I am also interested in methods in historiography and approaches to the archive, and in my research and teaching I draw on cultural production including literature, poetry, film, song and political movement materials such as pamphlets, posters, protest songs and chants.

I am currently preparing a monograph based on my doctoral research, which thinks about the Gulf through colonialism to independence as ‘worldmaking from below’, and a journal article on women’s participation in anti-colonial movements in the Gulf. There are two elements of my research that I am developing into future projects: the first draws on the work of Stuart Hall and others to think with racial difference and gendered racialisation in the study of the ethno-sectarian and national systems of classification in the Gulf under British colonialism. The second project is a transnational mapping of anti-imperial revolutionary movements in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region after the June 1967 war.