Announcements
Personal Statement:
I am a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East. The most enduring concern of my scholarly research has been to explore how individuals, groups, and governments deploy both concepts and material practices to shape economy, the body, the self, and the other. My research on Palestinian businessmen; reformers of the domestic sphere; thinkers and scientists; and British colonial officers and institutions contributes to social, cultural, and intellectual history, political economy, cultural studies, and gender studies. My new book project follows the trajectory of a peripatetic medical doctor to place Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession
Research and Teaching Interests:
Economic Thought
Development
The Body
Liberalism
Archives
Medicine
Current Projects:
From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine
Selected Publications:
“The Matter of Time,” American Historical Review, v. 124, Issue 5, December 2019, 1681–1688. Reprinted at Public Books
“How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 38:1 (May 2018)
Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
Stanford University Press, 2016.
“Bodies and Needs: Lesson from Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014); 784-786.
with Max Ajl, “Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other”
in Europe after Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, ed. Bora Isyar and Agnes Czajka. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
“Return to the Present.”
In Living Together, Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Peace and Violence, ed. Elisabeth Weber. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
“Arab Businessmen Challenge the 1940s Status Quo”
Mediterraneans 14 (Spring, 2010): 85-92.
“All That Is Chic: Geography and Desire”
In Sharif Waked, Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, 160-64. Tel Aviv: Andalus Publishing, 2007.
“Our Man Sisi,”
Jadaliyya (May, 2014)
“Commemorating Janet Abu-Lughod”
Jadaliyya (February, 2013)
“The Meaning of Revolution: On Samira Ibrahim”
Jadaliyya (January, 2013)
“Gender and the People in Revolutionary Times”
Jadaliyya (June, 2013)
Courses Taught:
HIST 46: Survey of Middle Eastern History
HIST 146: History of the Modern Middle East
HIST 102S: The Body and Revolution in Middle Easter History
HIST 146T: The History of Israel/Palestine
201ME: Advanced Historical Literature: Middle East Arab Liberalism and Neoliberalism
202: Historical Methods
Honors and Professional Activities:
2018-2019 University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellowship
2017-2018 Distinguished Teaching Award, Academic Senate, University of California, Santa Barbara
2016-2017 Harold J. Plous Award, University of California Santa Barbara
Co-founder, Co-editor, Jadaliyya
Advisory Board Member, R-Shief Online Archive Project
2013-2014, Excellence in Teaching Award, American University in Cairo