Biography

Anaheed Al-Hardan is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, where she teaches classic and contemporary social theory, historical sociology, empires, colonialism and decolonization, and experiential study abroad courses on colonialism in the present in collaboration with the Université des Antilles. 

She is a global and historical sociologist, and her research examines anticolonial social practices and knowledge-making across the Global South. Her first book, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), co-winner of the Academic Prize at the London Palestine Book Awards, is a study of Palestinian refugee communities’ countermemorial practices across generations as a form of resistance to their ongoing colonial dispossession. Palestinians in Syria was translated into Arabic and published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in 2020. She is also the co-editor, with J. Go, of Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which brings together essays that demonstrate how anticolonialism in history has produced a dissident social theory and imaginary with relevance for today. Her current book project, African-Asian Anticolonialism: The Reimagination of Arab Freedom and Internationalist Solidarity, takes the postcolonial nation-state’s transnational infrastructure of anticolonial knowledge production in the aftermath of the Second World War as its starting point, and makes the case for a conceptual tradition around a vast dissident theoretical lexicon which these infrastructures enabled, and as retold through archival research and fragments accross Cairo, Beirut, Bandung, New Delhi, Accra, London, Paris and E. Berlin.

In addition to her scholarship, Dr. Al-Hardan has curated “African-Asian Archives of Decolonization,” a special collection of Arabic-language materials from the decolonization era centered on the Cairo-based Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization and its networks at the American University of Beirut’s University Libraries. She has also most recently been awarded the English PEN Translates Award for her co-translation, with maia tabet, into English the late poet and writer Mohammad Al-Asa’ad’s genre-bending magic realist work of literary non-fiction on the 1948 Nakba, Children of the Dew (forthcoming with Tilted Axis Press).

Dr. Al-Hardan's research has been funded by the Palestinian-American Research Center, the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an Arcapita Visiting Professorship in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, and an ASCEND Faculty Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at Yale University.