Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis, with graduate group affiliations in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. Her first book, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025; co-winner, 2026 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize) is an interdisciplinary study of how and why Asian diasporas remain stubbornly attached to settler colonial ideals despite experiences of colonization, racism, and displacement. It turns to the worldmaking capacities of film as a generative site through which to think through the impasses of diaspora and Indigeneity.  She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's special issue, Assemblages of Settler Colonial Critique. She is currently at work on a second book which takes as its starting point Muslim collaborations with the far-right vis-a-vis digital platforms. 

Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ, Feminist Studies, American Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Lateral; and in public-facing venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine.