Research Expertise and Interest

critical theory, Middle Eastern Studies, Legal and political thought, law and humanities, law and society, legal histories, colonialism and post-colonialism, anti-colonialism

Research Description

Samera Esmeir is completing a second book titled The Struggle that Remains: Between the World and the International. Thinking from Palestine's revolutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book tracks the modern entry of the word international into the English language and theorizes its emergence as a contending signifier of the world, as well as its reconfiguration of horizons of revolutionary struggle. Her first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Spring 2012, Stanford University Press), is a historical and theoretical study of how colonial juridical powers reconfigured the figure and the concept of the human during the late-modern colonial era by bonding the human to state law.  She has also started researching a third book titled The Path of the Dead, which considers the place of the dead in modern politics and law. 

Together with Natalia Brizuela, she is the co-director of the projects of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2020-2024). Since 2019, she has been serving as the senior editor of Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory