Biography
I am the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Modern Global History at Exeter College. Originally from Burlington, Vermont, I studied at Williams College and the University of Texas at Austin before completing my Ph.D. in the history of the modern Middle East at Brown University in 2022. I was also a teaching fellow in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College. I first came to Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher with the Moving Stories project. Today, I’m happy to be a part of Exeter’s thriving community of students, scholars, and staff.
Research
My research explores middle-class political life in Lebanon, Syria, and their diasporas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have been particularly interested in how the burgeoning middle classes of the region thought about popular, mass, and democratic politics in dialogue with global patterns of social mobility and intellectual exchange, and not strictly via the nation-state as a principle of political representation. In that vein, my book project traces the emergence of youth as a political category from ‘chiefs of young men’ in nineteenth-century Ottoman Mt. Lebanon to youth volunteer clubs in interwar French Mandate Lebanon. However, I’m also interested in a variety of approaches to the global Middle East, having recently delved into the histories of a peripatetic Syriac Catholic priest and Lebanese immigrants in early twentieth-century Massachusetts, amongst others.
Teaching
At Exeter, I primarily teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century global history, namely EWF11: Imperial and Global History, 1750-1930 and EWF14: The Global Twentieth Century, 1930-2003. I also help teach a document-based Optional Subject on intercommunal relations in nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria for the Faculty of History. I’m glad to be a resource for Exeter and WEPO students interested in modern global history and the Middle East.
Selected Publications
“El Zaím: Youth, Authority, and Syrian Nationalism in the Mahjar, 1938–1944,” Mashriq & Mahjar (2023)
“From Their Classes to the Masses: Youth Volunteerism and Rural Welfare in Interwar Lebanon and Syria,” in Interwar Crossroads: Entangled Histories of the Middle Eastern and North Atlantic World between the World Wars (2022)
