Professor Ladha’s work centers on the relation of philosophy and literature. He anchors his research at the intersections of Arabo-Islamic thought, French and German philosophy and literature, and their respective legacies in francophone cultural expressions.

He is the author of The Architecture of Freedom: Hegel, Subjectivity, and the Postcolonial State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), which offers a new reading of Hegel’s related theories of language and the aesthetic, mastery and servitude, and subjectivity and the state, tracing the implications of these concepts for postcolonial studies and political theory. He has also co-edited French Exceptionalism: Islam and the Rhetoric of Secularism, a special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (Routledge, 2023).

Professor Ladha’s scholarship spans a range of disciplines, with work published in the critical theory journal October, the medieval studies journal Exemplaria, and Journal of Arabic Literature. He has written on Hegel’s theory of history; Hegel and Fanon on revolution, sublimity, and the state; pre-Islamic poetry and the epistemological foundations of Arabo-Islamic thought; medieval Arabic poetry and the advent of the Sicilian sonnet; and Mallarmé’s Divagations. He is currently completing a project on aesthetics and democracy in Rousseau and Hegel.

His current book projects include The Theater of Spirit: Poetry and the Coming Modernity, which investigates the relation between poetry, epistemology, and time in Hegel, Mallarmé, and Hart Crane, and Solomon and the Caliphate of Man, which examines the epistemic foundations of Arabo-Islamic thought from early Arabic poetry and the Qur’an to Arabic linguistics and contemporary theories of the legal and political subject.

His others works include The Mamertine Group, a series of virtual public interventions that implicate architecture in the political imaginary, relating monumental form to questions of sovereignty, citizenship, culture, and history. His “Prison-Wall” project has been featured in over one hundred publications internationally including UConn Today, The Guardian, CNBC, The New York Times,  Wired, Fusion, and CNN.

Professor Ladha has lectured internationally, including at the École Normale Supérieure at the Rue d’Ulm, the American University of Cairo, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Harvard University, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.