I am a PhD candidate studying the history of the modern Middle East. My research focuses on gender, race, racialization, and blackness in modern Yemen. My dissertation “Native Outsiders: Marginalized Subjects and Communities in Modern Yemen” is a social history of Yemen’s subaltern communities in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. It draws on Middle East Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, and Black Studies to recenter Yemen as a global anchor of East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. As a counter to the more familiar tribal and territorial Yemen, I introduce an “Oceanic Yemen” that better reflects Southern Arabia’s deep oceanic legacies. An Oceanic Yemen framework also helps redraw boundaries of belonging across often-separated geographical and disciplinary spaces.

My previous work explores the codification of Islamic family laws in North Yemen, South Yemen, and the Republic of Yemen. It highlights how the personal status laws of each Yemeni state constructed an image of “the ideal Yemeni woman” and how Yemeni states used this image to further their state-building project.

Native Outsiders: Marginalized Subjects and Communities in Modern Yemen