Asma Abbas

Asma Abbas is a political theorist, teacher, and curator working across materialist, anticolonial, and diasporic thought, at the crossings of politics, aesthetics, poetics, and ethics. She has been teaching with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research since 2015, where her courses treat philosophy, literature, and art as sites for thinking and remaking the political in its most urgent and difficult forms.

She is Professor Emerita of Politics and Philosophy at Bard College, after the closure of Simon’s Rock where she taught from 2005-2025 and founded transdisciplinary and experimental programs of study. She is currently Professor of Political Science and Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.

Her work is marked by a sustained internationalism that moves across institutions and publics: between Karachi, New York, Great Barrington, Brno, Dublin, Granada, Casablanca, Florence, Naples, and Milan. Across these sites, and through her work with Hic Rosa, she builds forms of study that move between seminar, studio, exhibition, and political education.

She is the author of Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited and Liberalism and Human Suffering, and co-editor of Falsework Smalltalk: Political Education, Aesthetic Archives, and Recitations of a Future in Common. Her current work includes Anti-Odysseus and State and Form, alongside ongoing inquiries into histories of reading, antifascism, the postcolony, and the political education of feeling.

Her classes are spaces for close reading, relational risk, and collective inquiry—and about re-learning how to think with each other, in, for, and against the present.