Research

My research brings together themes of nationalism, racialisation, state violence, and memory. My work has been published in a number of international sociological and interdisciplinary journals, including Memory Studies, Current Sociology, Critical Sociology, Postcolonial Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
My first book, entitled Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary: Making Melancholia (Routledge), examines how a century-old conflict widely perceived as a European civil war remains a catalyst for constructing collective identity in two post-imperial, multicultural nations. I argue that the dominant narrative of Muslim colonial subjects at war writes the nation’s own idea of its contemporary self onto the past. In this narrative, empire is rewritten as multiculturalism, and colonial soldiers establish the conditions under which contemporary Muslims might belong to the nation.
My current research engages with contesting statues, imperial nostalgia, and decolonising the museum.