Hanan Toukan completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London, where she won the Middle East Studies Association of North American Malcolm H. Kerr Award for best PhD in the Social Sciences for 2012. Her research sits at the intersection of Middle Eastern studies, international politics, critical theory, political theory, and colonial/postcolonial studies. She has held faculty positions at Bard College Berlin and Brown University and taught at SOAS University in London and Marburg University in Germany. She is a recipient of several research awards and was the EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2019-23). Toukan is the author of The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan published with Stanford University Press (2021).