About

I am a writer, editor, and PhD Candidate in History working across the fields of modern Middle East and late Ottoman History, Religious Studies, Archival Studies, and the Latin East (Middle East-Latin American studies). My research examines religious difference, communal institutions, the development of sectarianism, and historical memory in modern Egypt as well as transnationally between El Salvador and Palestine during the 20th Century.

Provisionally titled “Their Own Poor: Communal Identity, Charitable Societies, and the Making of Sectarianism in Modern Egypt 1879-1939” my dissertation examines the formation, development, and popularity of charitable societies in Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I consider the meteoric rise and proliferation of charitable associations during this period as both a form of cross-confessional solidarity as well as communal boundary-making at a time when the meaning of sectarianism in Egypt was debated and forged. I argue that charitable societies were central to how religious communities articulated the boundaries of their identity and how they related to ‘others’ within the Egyptian national project during the nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My research and language studies have been generously supported by the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), the Yale Center for Race, Indigenous, and Transnational Migration, the American Society for Church History (ASCH), the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Borchard European Studies Foundation, the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.

In addition to my academic scholarship, I also write reportage, commentary, and creative nonfiction which further explores questions related to my research through personal and investigative essays on race, religion, and politics in and between Egypt, El Salvador, and the United States. This work is published in The Washington Post, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, the New Arab, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, HAZINE, the Revealer, Sojourners, Contingent Magazine, Rusted Radishes and more.