Her first monograph, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World, examines the ways in which Palestinian cultural producers in Israel during the 1950s and ‘60s positioned themselves within an Arab and third world social, cultural and intellectual milieu that extended far beyond the confines of the Israeli nation-state. By mapping the strategies they deployed, this work demonstrates the importance of Arabic newspapers and literary journals in traversing national boundaries and in creating transnational and transregional communities of solidarity. In 2018 Brothers Apart received a Palestine Book Award for academic titles.
She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Middle Eastern history and historiography, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Islamic thought. She has experience conducting fieldwork in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine.
Maha is also a 2018 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project and a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka - The Palestinian Policy Network. Her analysis and opinion pieces have appeared in numerous U.S.-based publications including The Washigton Post, The Forward and The Hill.