Her research focuses on the politics of aesthetics across North Africa. Her first book, Untranslatable Justice: The Politics of Fiction in the Postcolony (Algeria 1962-2001), brings together close readings of fiction, film, and photographs with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of state violence and the stakes of literary study. In her teaching as well as her research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies. Her work centers the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.