Books

Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880-2022 (UNC Press, November 2026)
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Real and imagined versions of the island and the microbe come together to tell a new story about geopolitical relations between two successive Anglophone empires: the British and the American. Bassam Sidiki assembles a vast archive of literary, cultural, and medical documents to argue that claims of British or American insularity are specious; these Anglophone empires have been economically, culturally, and scientifically interdependent since the turn of the century to the present as the British century gave way to the American. Ironically, the inter-imperial relations that refute imperial insularity are often most visible in island-like spaces such as gardens, ships, and brothels, and in actual tropical islands where the two imperial powers have worked together—or at odds—to hold infectious diseases at bay.

Literature and War Medicine (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026) Access here

This short monograph argues for the centrality of armed conflict in cultural histories of health and medicine. The emerging field of health humanities has not engaged substantively with the burgeoning signifying practices that thematize the many pathologies – physical, psychological, and social – engendered by war. How can health humanists theorize injury, healing, and disablement by closely reading literary narratives that grapple with these historical moments? How can novels, memoirs, and short stories that represent war medicine – and sustained attention to their formal properties – provide an alternative avenue for bioethical and
biopolitical inquiry? Literature and War Medicine appraises contemporary literature representing medicine, illness, and disability amid the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, WWI, WWII, postcolonial civil wars in Asia and Africa, and the Global War on Terror.