Ruqaiyah Zarook is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University, specializing in the social and political history of the modern United States. Her research interests include labor history, the American West and borderlands history, as well as the history of national security. In 2026-2027, she is a Silas Palmer Fellow at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University and an Arthur J. Quinn Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
Ruqaiyah holds a BA in History and Middle East Studies from McGill University and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University, where she was a graduate research assistant for the NYU Prison Education Program’s Debt and Incarceration Project and an editorial assistant for the Journal on Education in Emergencies. At Princeton, she co-organized the Global and Colonial History Workshop.
Before pursuing a PhD, she was a Ben Bagdikian Fellow at Mother Jones.