Omar Safadi is a PhD candidate at UChicago’s Political Science department. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, Omar’s empirical research is anchored in contemporary Lebanon, where he theorizes questions pertaining to political violence, sectarianism, religious authority, and gender and sexuality. His work focuses on the problem of attachment to political authority and the affective architecture of religious and secular power within state and society. In particular, the dissertation will explore how blood, death, and kinship are imagined and narrativized in religious and secular life-worlds across the country. How do past and present experiences of violence and bloodshed contribute to the “group feeling” of the myriad political communities in contemporary Lebanon? How do fears around collective existence and survival serve to attach subjects and societies to non-democratic forms of social and political life? And what can the particular case of Lebanon clarify about the relationship between global populism and religious orthodoxy, between affect and politics? His master’s thesis, Sectarianism and the Sodomite: Homophobia, Communal Identity, and Globalization in Lebanon, explores the intersection of sectarianism and sexuality. Informed by logics of preservation, fears of extermination, and apocalyptic visions of sectarian civil strife, homophobia has worked as a technology of sectarian re-entrenchment in Christian Mount Lebanon.