
Biography
Areas of Specialization
- 20th & 21st-century African American Culture
- Black Studies | Philosophy &Theory
- Feminist Theory
- Literary Criticism
Activities and Interests
My scholarship is in African American literary studies of the 20th and 21st centuries. My work closely examines literary texts in order to consider how fictional and nonfictional narratives treat emergent forms of thought and social contradictions during the moment of their production. My most recent book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press, 2021), tracks how age for people of the Black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Black Age argues that over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the Black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to liberal humanist measures of time on various scales. Constituted through processes of violence and reasoning that alienated bodies from historical, developmental, and legal schedules of time, Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. My first book, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), argues that the multiracial movement of the 1990s and 2000s was symptomatic of irreconcilable and disavowed losses of second-wave feminism, evidenced in the foreclosure of interracial feminist alliances.
Research
Selected Research
- Habiba Ibrahim, "Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed." Anthropology and Humanism, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12411.
- Habiba Ibrahim and Badia Ahad, "Introduction: Black Temporality in Times of Crisis." South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, "Black Temporality in Times of Crisis," edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, 121.2 (2022).
- Habiba Ibrahim. Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life. New York University Press, 2021.
- Habiba Ibrahim. "Any Other Age: Vampires and Oceanic Lifespans," African American Review, 49.4 (Winter 2016) 313-327.
- Habiba Ibrahim. "The Time of the Multiracial," American Literary History 27.3 (2015), 549-556.
- Habiba Ibrahim. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
- Habiba Ibrahim. “’The Scottsboro Case’ and ‘Afrocentrism’.” Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Macmillan Reference. 2007.
- Habiba Ibrahim. “’Toni Morrison’ and ‘Double Standard’.” Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press. 2007.
- Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, eds. South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, "Black Temporality in Times of Crisis," 121.1 (2022)
- Habiba Ibrahim. "Mixed Race." Keywords for African American Studies. New York University Press, 2018.
Research Advised
- Frantece, Brittney. Imagine Another World: A Philosophical Approach to Black Speculative Arts and Literature. 2024. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Dinh, Thaomi Michelle. The Politics of Care: Historical Retrieval in Vietnamese American Cultural Production. 2021. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- De Vos, Laura M. Spirals of Transformation: Turtle Island Indigenous Social Movements and Literatures. 2020. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Cen Wei. Chinese International Students in American Colleges: Origin, Process, and Influence. 2018
- Collin Sprenkle. Fly Fishing and the Female Form: Meditations and Investigations into the Corporeal Transformations Experienced in the River.
- Jazzy Hothi. "I am Here: Illuminating Black Women’s Resistances to Individualistic Notions of Self-Care," 2018.