Zainab Abdali is the Public Humanities Graduate Associate at the Humanities Research Center. She manages the Center's Houston Humanities program, liaisons with graduate students, and assists with the HRC's programs, operations, and events.

Zainab is a PhD candidate in English at Rice University. She researches contemporary South Asian and Arab Anglophone art and literature. Her dissertation project, titled Reading the War on Terror: Towards an Abolitionist Horizon, examines art and literature emerging from the War on Terror, and considers the literary, visual, and material forms of anti-war resistance and solidarity being articulated through these works. Zainab's Public Humanities work includes her work as a co-founder of the Rice Asian Diasporic and Asian American Research Collective (RADAAR), a program of Rice University's Chao Center for Asian Studies. RADAAR is an interdisciplinary collective for academic research, community collaboration, and advocacy work around Asian and Asian American Studies. Through RADAAR, Zainab has organized Texas-wide symposia for Asian & Asian American Studies, cultural events serving the greater Houston community, and speaker events around political issues affecting the Asian American community. Zainab is also a two-time recipient of the English department's Clancy Taylor Summer Public Humanities Fellowship, through which she worked on the Living West as Feminists project.

Zainab holds a Bachelor's degree in English & Textual Studies and Mathematics from Syracuse University, and is also a former Fulbright scholar, having served as an English Teaching Assistant in Nairobi, Kenya.