Israa Khalifa is a PhD student in the Anthropology and History program. Her dissertation research focuses on the history of science and technology in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular emphasis on the Trucial States. Her work explores the role of technology in the establishment of the nation-state in the 20th century, particularly examining the history of genomics and genetics as reverberated in the work of anthropologists and geographers traveling through the region. She also investigates the relationship between machinery used for oil drilling, developments in finance and the banking industry, and how these elements shaped state formation. Through this, she broadly examines the abstraction of space, time, the body, and nature.
In addition to her dissertation, Israa has been researching the Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi collection at U-M’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection and the NYU Abu Dhabi collection to explore themes of nationalism and technoscience in early twentieth-century Egypt.