Maya Wind is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Black Study. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University, and was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
Her scholarship investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024) argues that Israeli universities are enlisted in Israel’s settler-colonial project.
Her current book project, which draws on her ethnographic fieldwork and doctoral dissertation, argues that scientific and social experimentation with Israeli citizens is foundational to global technologies and models of security. She has received support for this project from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust.
Maya researches, writes, and teaches in collaboration with local and transnational coalitions organizing for abolition, demilitarization, and decolonization.