Omar Zahzah

Omar Zahzah is an Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies (AMED) in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State University. Dr. Zahzah holds a B.A. in Comparative World Literature and Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach, and an M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Dr. Zahzah is the former Education and Advocacy Coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine has been an organizer for Palestinian liberation for many years.

His current research focuses on how Black, Arab American and Palestinian creatives utilize cultural means of resisting converging projects of securitization as well as globalizing paradigms of racialized policing and surveillance. Dr. Zahzah’s broader research interests include Arab American Studies, Black studies, American Studies, cultural studies, Palestine, the War on Terror, surveillance, the critical sociology of policing, national liberation, counter-insurgency/pacification, post-colonial studies, Indigenous studies, settler-colonialism, resistance literatures, institutional cooptation of radical movements, and cross-movement solidarity.     

Dr. Zahzah’s academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from journals such as Arab Studies Quarterly and collections such as Centering the Margins: Reimagining the Field of Arab American Studies. He is also a creative writer and freelance journalist.

Dr. Zahzah’s book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle is forthcoming from the Censored Press in Fall 2024, and he is currently at work on a monograph based on his dissertation, Undercover and Hyper-Visible: Security Poetics and Pacification Prosaics in African American and Arab American Literature.