Hengameh Ziai

Hengameh Ziai is Lecturer in the History of Middle East and Africa at SOAS, University of London. Her research intersects political theory, political economy, and Islamic studies, focusing on colonial formations in Sudan. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

Her current book project examines the Mahdist insurgency through conceptual frameworks of debt and property. A second project reconstructs histories of capitalism through 19th-century Sudanese merchant archives.

Her research investigates neoliberal concept genealogy, particularly 'human capital' theories in development economics and their implementation in World Bank agricultural interventions.