Ruqaiyah Zarook is a first-year PhD student in the Department of History at Princeton University specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history. Her research interests are in Cold War history, the history of technology, and carceral studies. She has latent interests in right-wing American political culture and modern libertarian movements from the counterculture era of the 1960s to the present.

She is currently working on two research projects: an intellectual history of the Cold War national security state and a global history of the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s.

Ruqaiyah earned her joint honors B.A. in History and Middle East Studies from McGill University and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University through a John Draper Scholarship, where she was a research assistant for the NYU Prison Education Program and an intern for the American Geographical Society. Her writing on books, culture, and politics can be found in the Nation, Dissent, and Mother Jones.