Research Bio

Samiha Khalil is Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric. Her forthcoming manuscript, Palestine, and the Future of Home, examines the question of Palestine as a critical theoretical problem related to philosophical and psychoanalytic conceptions of alienation and exile. Khalil's former training in critical human geography and architecture informs the methodological and spatial approach to the study and teaching of the question of Palestine, offering a venue to recover Palestinian positionality by giving it a developed presence in contemporary critical scholarship and debates.

Before joining the Department of Rhetoric, Khalil was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at UC, Riverside (2023–25). Her work has appeared in Atlantic Studies, and Psychoanalysis and History, with forthcoming publications in Qui Parle, and Critical Times.

Research Expertise and Interest

rhetoric, critical theory, the question of Palestine, alienation and exile