Stephen Sheehi (Michigan, MA, PhD, Temple, BA; pronouns he/his/his) is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of Arab Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is a joint appointment in the Program of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) and the Arabic Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and a core faculty member of the Asian & Pacific-Islander American Studies Program (APIA).

Prof. Sheehi is also Founding Faculty Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William and Mary, which seeks to validate, elevate and learn from knowledge practices, and creative expressions of communities of color, natives and displaced peoples and marginalized identities.

Prof. Sheehi’s work examines cultural, intellectual, art history, and the political economy of the Middle East, with a special emphasis on the late Ottoman Empire and the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-‘arabiyah). His research and written commentaries have also examined photography, psychoanalysis, minorities in the Middle East, Islamophobia in the United States and contemporary issues of the Middle East and North America. In addition to Middle Eastern studies and Islamophobia, he has had a life-time engagement with Arab and Muslim American issues, globalization and economic equity, transformative education, and social justice. He remains interested in and a perennial student of decolonial theory and praxis, psychoanalysis, and cultural and poststructural theory.


Prof. Sheehi is the author of three books: The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016); Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Clarity Press, 2011), which has been translated into Arabic as al-Islamofobia: al-Hamlah al-idiulujiyah dud al-Muslimin translation by Fatimah Nasr (Cairo: Dar al-Sutour, 2012); and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (University Press of Florida, 2004).

Dr. Sheehi discusses the 40th Annual Spring Meeting of Division 39 – Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA), March 18-21, 2020, New York City.

The conference Psychoanalysis to Come: Community and Culture, July 24-26, 2020, Copenhagen is also discussed.

This discussion is also available to view at YouTube:

Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by psychoanalyst Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who interviews psychoanalysts, psychologists, scholars, creative arts therapists, writers, poets, philosophers, artists & other intellectuals about their process, world events, the current state of mental health care, politics, culture, the arts & more. Episodes are also created from lectures given at various international conferences.

Please support the podcast at: www.patreon.com/vanessa23carl

Become a Patron!

Rendering Unconscious is also a book! Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics and Poetry (Trapart, 2019).

Rendering Unconscious Podcast can be found at:
Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud
Please visit the About page for links to all of these sites.

For more, please visit the following websites:
www.renderingunconscious.org
www.drvanessasinclair.net
www.trapart.net
division39springmeeting.net

The track at the end of the episode is “Knight of Swords” from the album “The Chapel is Empty“. Words by Vanessa Sinclair. Music by Akoustik Timbre Frekuency. Available from Trapart Editions and Highbrow-Lowlife.

Music for intro and outro of Rendering Unconscious Podcast by Carl Abrahamsson.

Photo of Dr. Stephen Sheehi