I am an Assistant Professor of Screen Cultures and Heritage with a foundation in cultural studies and an interdisciplinary background spanning media studies, memory studies, and urban studies. My research examines the intersection of popular culture and political ideology, exploring how cultural narratives shape, reflect, and contest power dynamics in society.

My first book, Longing for Order: Viral Retropolitics in post-revolutionary Egypt (work in progress), investigates how nostalgic discourses endorsed a return to authoritarianism following the Arab Uprisings. It examines how groups of Egyptian middle-class men, lacking yet aspiring to epistemic authority, used social media to construct online memorials celebrating the nation's "good old days" that serves as outlets to air grievances and anxieties about the present and the future. This work received an award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in 2023. My current research explores the aesthetics of fascism online, with a particular focus on kitsch as both an aesthetic bound to generative AI tools and a political force used by authoritarian regimes.

Prior to joining Utrecht University, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Global Digital Cultures and a lecturer in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. I obtained my PhD, supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-INT) fellowship, from the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture (UvA, 2023). At the same time, I served as the PI of the GDC project Social Media After the Arab Uprisings. In an earlier life, I designed books, spaces, and maps. One of my projects, The Other Maps of Egypt, received the DAAD-GERSS grant and was featured in various cultural outlets, from This is Not at Atlas to the World Humanities Report.

At Utrecht University, I am open to supervising theses on global digital cultures, digital ethnography, third cinema, and postcolonial media practices, histories, and infrastructures.