Nour MJ Hodeib

Student Fellow

Nour Mohamad Jamil Hodeib is a writer, scholar, and cultural activist based in Brooklyn, New York. Hodeib is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the history program, Graduate Center (CUNY), writing a dissertation on leftist sonic countercultures of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Specifically, Hodeib explores how a quasi industry emerged around songs by communist artists during the war, contextualizing songs within the period’s technological, political, economic and cultural dynamics. Hodeib asks how a study of songs can provide a nuanced understanding of the experience and memory of that period (away from the politics of amnesia that prevail post-war Lebanon). Beyond Lebanon, Hodeib examines Beirut as a site of the Global Sixties in which globalized pop cultural phenomena like Rock’n’Roll intersected with Third Worldist revolutionary rhetoric.




Participating Years


2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail.  What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?