She is widely known for numerous books, articles and encyclopedia entries, as well as public lectures on gender and sexuality in the Arab world. Some publishers of her academic works include E.J. Brill, Oxford University Press and Routledge. She has given invited lectures at some of the best universities in the world, including Yale, Brown, Stanford and Columbia.
She has also worn the editor’s and translator’s hats — serving as editor-in-chief of Nebula: A Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Scholarship and its subsidiary journals, and translating Arabic literature into English.
Dr. Habib is also a filmmaker. Her documentary, Homeless in Berkland, aired on Berkeley’s Comcast Channel 31 in December 2017. She was Executive Producer for two queer Arab short films, Finjan (2020) and Dress Up (2022). On the literary side, she has written three novels — A Tree Like Rain (2005), Rughum & Najda (2012), and The Greatest Story Ever Written — and is the creator of an anthology of three interconnected science-fiction television concepts and pilots.
Her research and writing has also focused on perennial ideas of well-being in mind science and psychology. Her online course, The Quantum Mind, reached students in over 60 countries during her years as a frequent contributor to the psychology portal Psych Central, prior to its acquisition by Healthline in 2020.
In addition to her contributions to gender and sexuality studies, literature, film and television, Dr. Habib is seasoned in quantitative research methodologies, leveraging data science to understand and solve business and social problems. She has led impact evaluations of national and international programs, designed and executed mixed-methods studies of markets and industries, and advised for-profit and non-profit organizations on strategy and organizational knowledge management.
Today, that throughline — rigorous inquiry in service of real-world problems — takes the form of Foragentis, the company behind ForaPost, ForaVoice, ForaPay and ForIntel — socially responsible agentic AI for the future of work, built on a single conviction: that growth, like everything in nature, flows best where it isn’t forced.
She lives in California with three very cheerful and very low-maintenance plants.
CSM · CAP