Hanna Alshaikh is a researcher of Arab and Palestinian intellectual history in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program. Her research examines the role of the Palestinian diaspora in Arab world political discourse, with a special focus on Palestinians in the United States. The project maps their transnational participation in shaping the Palestinian national movement, as well as their engagement with US politics. Her work sits at the intersection of Arab and Palestinian intellectual history, activist history, diaspora studies, Arab American studies, and the history of US social movements.

Hanna holds an MA from the University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where she wrote a thesis on Palestinian social history in the Late Ottoman period. Previously, Hanna was an adjunct professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University, teaching an introductory course on Islam and a course on religion and politics in the Middle East.