Amira Jarmakani (she/they) is a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at San Diego State University where she works on questions of race, gender, ethnicity and representation in U.S. popular culture as well as comparative orientalisms in the transnational Americas. Her most recent book, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (NYU Press, 2015), demonstrates how desire animates contemporary U.S. imperialism.