Ruqaiyah Damrah

Ruqaiyah is a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University whose research examines  how systems of circulation shape processes of colonial governance and socio-economic change. She is interested in the invisibilized infrastructure that serve as nodes of imperial violence, particularly in the Middle East. It is in these sites that the histories of capitalism, trade, oil, labor, migration, and violence accumulate. Through studying the history of these infrastructures - how they were created, what relations of power they structured, whose lives they governed - she hopes to historicize the conditions of possibility for contemporary imperial violence.

Ruqaiyah earned her MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, where she wrote a thesis on the British construction of Haifa harbor and how it transformed Palestine into a logistical corridor of empire. She earned her BA in History from Yale University.