Contact Information
lzbinden@macalester.edu
Wallin Postdoctoral Fellow 2025-2027
Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Macalester College
Education
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY | May 2025 | University of Southern California
American Studies and Ethnicity (ASE)
MASTERS OF ARTS | 2022 | University of Southern California
American Studies and Ethnicity
Exams: Arab American Studies | Arab Genealogies of Memory | Narratives of Medicine | Auto-Theory and Creative Non-Fiction as Anti-Colonial Methods
MASTERS OF ARTS | 2018 | San Diego State University
Women’s Studies
Master’s Thesis: “Path to Self, Path to Home: Arab Diasporic Reflections on State Violence, Authenticity, and Belonging”
BACHELORS OF ARTS | 2016 | University of California, San Diego
Psychology and Critical Gender Studies
Funding and Fellowships
Association of American University Women (AAUW): American Dissertation Fellowship
$25,000 2024-2025
Dornsife: Summer Research Grant
$3,000 2022
Dissertation
“Butterfly Affect: Arab Feminist Worldmaking in the Wake of Pain and Illness”
“Butterfly Affect” traces the ways that Arab feminists, women, and nonbinary people talk about, and experience illness and pain outside of Western paradigms of cure, isolation, and medicalization. Through what I call Arab(ic) melancholy–the collective, intergenerational, and transnational ways Arab women conceptualize chronic illness, seek treatment, and articulate pain– I outline alternative, post-colonial understandings of the body. Arab(ic) melancholy ultimately challenges US and European capitalist prioritization of productivity, cure, and biological-optimization of the body. Chapter one of my dissertation charts an Arab Feminist alternative to existing narratives of pain and illness. Through archival work, auto-theory and oral history interviews, I show how for Arab women, pain brings us closer together and is used as a point of intimacy between bodies, departing from narratives of pain as isolating and illnesses as individualized. My second chapter interrogates Arab and Arabic cultural articulations of grief and loss, and I chart the ways that thakla–an Arabic word for a kind of grief for which there is no English translation–has become what feminist and queer-of-color theorists call a public feeling for Arabs transnationally. Chapter three is a case study of clinical depression and the experiences of one Lebanese woman in navigating chronic illness, the US healthcare system, and what she calls “unrelenting depression”. I follow feminist methods of looking at the mundane everyday experiences of survival and ask what living with depression looks like when there is no cure. My final chapter charts the work of the Center for Arab Narratives and their community-based healthcare research. I look at the unique strategies that Arab-American healthcare researchers have utilized when collecting minority health data, and outline what strengths in researching health inequity can be fostered from interdisciplinary social scientists, public health, and humanities researcher collaborations.
Dissertation Chair: Evelyn Alsultany, she/her (American Studies and Ethnicity)
Dissertation Committee: Sarah Gualtieri, she/her (American Studies and Ethnicity), Nayan Shah, he/him (American Studies and Ethnicity), David Truer, he/him (English–Creative Nonfiction)
Teaching Interests
Arab American Studies
Transnational Feminisms
Disability Studies
History of Medicine
Feminist Theories and Methods
Narrative Medicine
Science and Technology Studies
Indigenous Methodologies
Queer Theory
Islamic Feminisms
Teaching Experience
Instructor of Record: Macalester College
August 2025 – December 2025
WGSS 294: Health and Power: Disability and Debility in a Globalized World
What is “health” in both a globalized world and a world shaped by legacies of colonialism, transatlantic enslavement, climate change, and forced migration? How do we understand disability – chronic or short term – as not just a biological experience, but a social one? In this interdisciplinary class we will look at case studies to try to answer these questions. Through these examples, we will discuss the ways that health, medicine, and disability become used to uphold US/European power and white supremacy, and become the gauge for deciding who is worth the classification of “human” and who is deemed not worthy of life.
January 2026 – June 2026
WGSS 200: Feminist/Queer Theories and Methods
January 2026 – June 2026
WGSS 394: Anti-Colonial Feminisms: Palestinian and Arab Women’s Resistance
Instructor of Record: University of Oregon
March 2023 – June 2023
IRES 101: Introduction to Ethnic Studies
This course served as an introduction to the theories, vocabulary, and areas of inquiry in the field of Ethnic Studies. Some of the topics covered included immigration laws, histories of sterilization, racialized epidemics and endemics, eugenics, gender and sexuality, media representations, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and mass incarceration.
January 2023 – March 2023
IRES 385: Critical Whiteness Studies
This course explored the social construction of race by investigating and historicizing “whiteness” as a racial category in the U.S. Topics included: how and why whiteness was invented; how this category excluded and then included various European immigrants; how whiteness (and white privilege) have been sustained through social, political, economic and legal practices; and how whiteness has been contested by whites and non-whites.
Instructor of Record: University of Southern California
January 2022 – May 2022
AMST 200: Introduction to American Studies: Race, Science, and Health
Students in this course acquired knowledge about the histories of scientific and medical racism and their impacts on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). We covered specific events – the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women and Black mothers on welfare, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, medical exams conducted at Ellis and Angel Island, Gaza as a weapons testing site, militarized policing of mental health services in Black and Muslim communities, etc. – through racial, feminist, and disability justice frameworks. This course exposed students to the fields of History of Medicine, Public Health, Science and Technology Studies, Genetics and Biology, Disability and Gender Studies.
Teaching Assistant / Dr. Evelyn Alsultany
August 2021 – December 2022, USC
AMST 200: Introduction to American Studies: Race in America
Teaching Assistant / Dr. Viet Than Nguyen
January 2021 – May 2021, USC
AMST 150: The American War in Vietnam
Teaching Assistant / Dr. Evelyn Alsultany
August 2020 – December 2020, USC
AMST 200: Introduction to American Studies: Race in America
Graduate Research Assistant / Dr. Evelyn Alsultany
June 2020 – August 2020, USC
Instructor
August 2017 – December 2017, SDSU
Women and Gender Equality (WAGE)
Graduate Research Assistant / Dr. Doreen Mattingly
May 2017 – June 2017, SDSU
Teaching Assistant / Dr. Huma Ahmed-Ghosh
August 2016 – May 2017, SDSU
WMST 310: Global Cultures, Women’s Lives WMST 536: Gender, Race and Class
Publications
(Forthcoming) Zbinden, L. (2025). “A Methodology of Grandmothers: Arab Feminist Offerings to Narratives of Pain and Illness” in Reimagining the Field of Arab American Studies, eds. Mahdi, Waleed and Haque, Danielle.
Zbinden, L. (2023). “Mitochondrial Agency: Towards a Host/Guest Theory of Co-Immunity”, Spontaneous Generations: Journal of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Volume 11, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2023) doi.org/10.4245/spongen.v11i1.12925 https://spontaneousgenerations.com
Zbinden, L. (2021). “Slow Death and Labored Breath: Listening to, Listening Through Inheritance”, Mizna Special Issue: I Want Sky. Asian American Writers Workshop and Mizna.
Zbinden, L. (2018). Path to Self, Path to Home: Arab Diasporic Reflections on State Violence, Authenticity, and Belonging (Master’s thesis).
Zbinden, L., Schlauderaff, S., & Rothblum, E.D. (2017). Review of Psychology and Gender Dysphoria: Feminist and Transgender Perspectives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 41, 535.
Professional Development
2024-2025. Graduate Student Coordinator: USC Critical SWANA Studies Research Cluster.
2021-2022. Graduate Student Coordinator: USC Critical SWANA Studies Research Cluster.
2021. Certificate in Future Faculty Teaching Institute. USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.
2021. Oral History Center Workshop. UC Berkeley.
Conferences
2023. Middle East Studies Association
Panel: Arab Memory Beyond Nationalism
Paper: Collective Body, Collective Memory: Oral Histories Through Shared Illnesses and Pain
2022. American Studies Association
Roundtable Moderator: #FreeThemAll: Do Terrorists Count as All?
2022. USC Department of Comparative Studies on Literature and Culture Annual Symposium
Panel: Illness: Getting Sick In/Of Colonial Empires and Post-Colonial Worlds; Paper: “Potentials of Chronic Pain: ‘Cripistemologies of Pain’ and Intimacy Across Empires”
2021. Making Sense: A Humanities Symposium; Rice University School of the Humanities.
Paper: “Silence and Death: An Inherited Archive”
2020. American Studies Association (canceled due to COVID) Moderator: Unimaginable Insurgencies: Creative Arab Dissent
2020. Arab American Studies Association (postponed due to COVID) Paper: Pathologizing Resistance and Mental Health: Anti-Black Racism and CVE
2019. National Women’s Studies Association; San Francisco, CA. Moderator, Roundtable: “LivingDying/DyingLiving – On the Practices of Becoming Extinct Otherwise”
2019. National Women’s Studies Association; San Francisco, CA. Participant, Roundtable: “Are Love and Healing Accessible to US?: Intimacy, Care and Crip Kinship Beyond Nationalisms”
2019. American Studies Association; Honolulu, HI.
Paper: “Surveillance Technologies and Questions of Futurity: Decolonial Arab, Crip, and Queered Possibilities for Liberatory Potentials”
2019. Gender, Bodies, and Technology; Virginia Tech, VA.
Paper: “Stripping for the State and Other Queer Acts: Technologies, Surveillance, and Questions of Objectivity”
2018. QGRAD; University of California, Los Angeles, CA.
Paper: “Decolonization is not a Metaphor: Sustainable Muslim Fashion, #becauseweveread, and Cyber Activism as (Web)sites of Radical Decolonization.”
2018. 14th Annual James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities; Lincoln, NE.
Paper: “On the Margins: Disrupting Narratives of Muslim Women”
Memberships
Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 2023-present
American Studies Association (ASA), 2019-present
Middle East Studies Association (MESA), 2018-present
Arab American Studies Association (AASA), 2017-present
Association for American University Women (AAUW), 2023-present
Faculty References
Evelyn Alsultany, evelyn.alsultany@usc.edu
Professor, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity; University of Southern California
Sarah Gualtieri, gualtier@usc.edu
Professor, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, Middle East Studies; University of Southern California
Nayan Shah, nayansha@usc.edu
Professor, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity; University of Southern California
layla zbinden 