Monograph still in progress. Based on my dissertation “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Literature and Media,” which I defended at Columbia University in August 2025.
One Thousand and One Nightmares sets out to answer a regional question that is now being asked around the globe: why are conspiracy theories so prevalent in the culture and politics of the Middle East? What role does conspiracy perform in relation to crisis, and how does it transform in dialogue with local and global shifts in power? My project charts a pre-digital cultural history of conspiracy and develops an interdisciplinary method for the study of conspiracy tropes in twentieth-century Middle Eastern literature and media. I analyze real conspiracies that took place in the region at the hands of colonial regimes or local autocrats as well as what I call the media afterlives of these conspiracies: the tropes, narratives, and fictions produced by journalists, writers, and artists in the cultural sphere to make sense of diffuse power networks and backroom geopolitics. The book tells an overarching story about how conspiracy becomes an increasingly totalizing and intimate framework for theorizing politics’ relationship to society—a seismograph for radical shifts in governing power structures and conceptions of the collective. The conspirator is at first a foreign colonial power, but moves ever inward in the public imagination: towards scheming minorities who are “fifth columns” within the newly independent nation; Cold-War-era collaborators who turn against their own communities for personal gain; and lastly, in the transition to the autocratic security state, the conspirator could be just about anyone: one’s colleague, neighbor, or child.