EDUCATION
2008 PhD Anthropology, Harvard University
1999 MPH Public Health, American University of Beirut
1997 MBChB (MD), College of Medicine, University of Baghdad
RESEARCH STATEMENT
Trained in medicine and anthropology, I work at the intersections of global health, history of medicine and political anthropology. My scholarship focuses on the human and environmental manifestations of decades of conflict and military interventions in Iraq and the broader Middle East. My first book, Ungovernable Life chronicles the rise and fall of state medicine in Iraq and the role of medical doctors in infrastructure making (and unmaking) in the country, dating back from the British Mandate (1920-1932). Arguing against narrow understanding of statecraft, I show the centrality of health, disease and the body to state-making history, as well as to the lived experiences of war, violence, and Empire.
My current research project is a multi-sited ethnography exploring what I call the “ecologies of wounds and wounding,” where I attempt to link the biophysical wounds of war to a broader understanding of wounding in contemporary conflicts. I focus on the biomedical, environmental, and social experiences of war injury, displacement, and the rise of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) across different conflict-settings and therapeutic geographies in the Middle East. Building on long-term fieldwork and professional engagement with local and international medical organizations (such as Doctors Without Borders), and with individuals and families wounded in ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria, I have been documenting the transformations in the landscapes and infrastructures of care resulting from the changing ecologies of war: the collapse of state healthcare systems, the destruction of the lived environment, the intensifications of mobility of patients and refugees across state borders, the proliferation of violence, and the manifestations of war’s toxic legacies.
This work has culminated in the inauguration of the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. The program is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the physical, psychological and social manifestations of war wounds.
