Hanan Toukan is Professor of Middle East Studies. Her research areas include Middle East studies, art and visual culture, cultural studies, as well as international politics, critical theory, and colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial studies. Her writings are concerned with the political and social roles art and cultural institutions play in our lives; the function(s) of art in international politics; museums and exhibitionary practices; migration and the movement of art objects; and the politics of knowledge production in and about the memories, displacements, racializations, histories and ecologies of Global South contexts.  She was previously visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and History of Art at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies of the Middle East at Bamberg University. She is also a recipient of several research awards including most recently from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Toukan completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London were she won the Middle East Studies Association of North American Malcolm H. Kerr Award for best PhD in the Social Sciences for 2012. 

Toukan is the author of The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan published with Stanford University Press (2021). Her writing has also been published in the academic journals Afterall (2024) Perspectives on Politics (2022) Journal of Visual Culture (2021, 2024), International Journal of Cultural Studies (2019), Radical Philosophy (2018), Cultural Politics (2016), Jerusalem Quarterly (2016), Journal for Palestine Studies (2013), Arab Studies Journal (2011), Review of Middle East Studies (2011) and SCTIW Review (2014), amongst others. She has published book chapters in Leila Farsakh (ed.), Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Statehood (University of California Press, 2021); Viola Shafik (ed), Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa (Cairo University Press, 2021); Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil (eds.), Commitment and Beyond: Locating the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2015); and Dina Matar and Zahera Harb (eds.), Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (IB Tauris, 2013). 
 
Toukan’s writings on film, art and cultural criticism have also appeared in various catalogs and art publications such as Jacobin (2022, with Sultan Doughan), Rusted Radishes (2022), Art Forum (2021, with Adila Laidi Hanieh), e-flux (2021), openDemocracy (2021), Jadaliyya (2012, 2011), Ibraaz  (2013, 2012), Unmade Film (2013) ed. Uriel Orlow (Zurich: edition Fink), and The Abraaj Capital Art Prize catalogue (Spectral Imprints) (2012), amongst others. 

She serves on the editorial committee of Jerusalem Quarterly, as series editor of Anthem Press’s new Palestine Studies Series, and as a member of the Programs and Collections Committee of the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah. She is currently co-editing a volume on Palestinians, memory culture, cultural production, and the politics of injury and erasure in Germany and beyond.