Hanine Shehadeh teaches and writes about modern Arab histories and intellectual history. She has a particular interest in theories of European antisemitism, settler colonialism and religion — including theories of nationalism, race and militarism.

Her current research looks at the history of European Christian Zionism as a political, ideological, racial, and gendered knowledge project, engineered to colonize Palestine, long before the creation and production of Jewish Zionism. She approaches Christian Zionism — in both its religious and secular notions  — as a broad set of colonial and political efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine. 

Shehadeh completed her PhD in Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York City. Her research, which provided a history of the constructed social, political, religious, and cultural phenomenon of the dishonorable Jew in European Christian antisemitic Zionism, and later Jewish Zionism, was nominated for Columbia University’s Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies. Her work on affect formation in settler-colonial societies was granted Columbia University’s Humanities War and Peace Initiative award (HWPI). 

She is currently a Research Associate at the Maroun Samaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, where she had co-founded the “Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s genocide” project.