Bassam Sidiki

Bassam Sidiki is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as Core Faculty in Asian American Studies and as a Faculty Affiliate with both the South Asia Institute and the Humanities, Health, and Medicine M.A. program. His interdisciplinary scholarship bridges postcolonial studies, medical humanities, and disability studies.

Education:

• Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• M.A. in Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Northwestern University (2017)
• A.B. in English, Georgetown University (2016)

Dr. Sidiki's research examines the intersections of colonial discourse, medical knowledge production, and disability representation. His work investigates how infectious diseases have shaped imperial relations, particularly focusing on British-US imperial dynamics throughout the twentieth century. He analyzes the representation of disability in postcolonial literature, the politics of medical gaze in colonial contexts, and the cultural memory of the Sindhi diaspora. His scholarship employs interdisciplinary methodologies drawing from literary studies, history of medicine, and critical disability theory to reveal how biopolitical frameworks operated across imperial spaces. His approach centers on understanding how medical knowledge functioned simultaneously as tools of imperial power and sites of resistance.

His recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on disease, empire, and representation across multiple journals including Victorian Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. His creative nonfiction appears in Hyphen, The Bangalore Review, and Wordgathering. A unifying thread in his work examines how medical practices and disease narratives have reinforced and challenged imperial hierarchies, with particular attention to oceanic spaces, quarantine systems, and the movement of bodies across imperial boundaries.

Dr. Sidiki is currently completing his first academic book, Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880-2020, under contract with UNC Press. This cultural history explores infectious disease and British-US imperial relations across the long twentieth century, examining how islands and oceanic spaces functioned as critical sites for disease containment and transmission within imperial networks.

As an educator, Sidiki teaches courses including Postcolonial Literature, Victorian Literature, and specialized seminars on literature and medicine. His office is located in PAR 126 at the University of Texas at Austin (campus mail code: B5000), though he is on leave during the fall 2024 semester.