I am a historian of science, race, and gender in the modern Middle East, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of critical race and gender studies, decolonial materiality, and histories of science, technology, and medicine in the non-West. My first book, Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine Egypt (under contract with Duke University Press), uses a material archive of talismans and charms to illuminate the role of women healers in the global development of anthropology and local economies of healing in colonial Egypt. My second project, Living Fossils, draws on environmental history and history of technology to understand how the bodies of rural Egyptians became a contested site for the mediation of ideas about science, technology, and environments in the global historical imagination. 

My scholarship has appeared in Isis, History of the Present, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and the Los Angeles Review of Books and is forthcoming in the American Historical Review. My article, “An (Un)Natural History,” was awarded the David Edge Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science and the Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society. My research has been funded by Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, the Social Science Research Council, and the Council for American Overseas Research Centers. I am currently a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School.

I received my Ph.D. in History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. I graduated from the American University in Cairo with a dual BA in Honors Political Science and Sociology. I was previously an Academy Scholar at The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

I am currently working on two books. My first book, Amulet Tales, reconstructs the role that wise women, especially Upper Egyptian and African women healers, played in the global development of anthropological expertise and the robust spiritual economy of healing in late Ottoman and British colonial Egypt. The project combines Middle East Studies’ rich foundation of gender history, with insights from science and technology studies, critical race and post-colonial studies, and scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences to consider how racialized constructions of these “superstitious women”—along with the socio-medical, spiritual, and economic worlds they inhabited—shaped the making of modern Egypt. Utilizing a material archive of wise women’s amulets and talismans, Amulet Tales recasts histories of magic, medicine, markets, and museums through the ideas and practices of wise women to argue that the development of anthropological thought in Egypt and abroad hinged on the study of “superstitious” healing practices or “old wives medicine” (tibb al-rukka) attributed to Upper Egyptian and African healing practitioners.

My second book project, Living Fossils, interrogates how Egyptian and European agricultural scientists, physicians, and entomologists theorized the body of the Egyptian fellah as an entity that metaphorically and materially straddled the boundaries between “environment” and “technology” in Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mythologized as ancient technologies born from the mud of the Nile itself, the laboring bodies of rural Egyptians were central to the making of modern Egypt. The project draws from critical race theory and histories of environment and technology to explore how the racialized bodies and bodily labor of the Egyptian fellahin subsidized the global development of the natural, physical, and social sciences. It demonstrates how and why the violent extraction of their labor took place when they were alive—in the field, factory, and in the birthing clinic—and continued after death on the dissection table.

Articles
Edited Collections
Book Reviews
Recorded Talks and Lectures
  • HIST 146W Gender and Sexualities in Modern Middle Eastern History
  • HIST 146R Undergraduate Research Seminar | Science and Society in the Middle East
  • HIST 201S Graduate Seminar | Race (and) Science in Global History 
New Courses for 2024-2025
  • HIST 104SS Race, Science, and Society (W)
  • HIST 201S Graduate Seminar | Science in the Cinema: A History Through Film (S)
  • 2023-2025 Junior Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School, University of Virginia
  • 2022 Mellon Foundation/UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program UC-HSI Humanities Initiative Recipient
  • 2019 WHOME Graduate Student Article Prize for “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt”
  • 2019 ANAMED Ottoman Language Summer Program (Advanced)
  • 2019 CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellowship (Turkey and Egypt)
  • 2019 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
  • 2017-2018 Fellow-In-Residence, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Philadelphia, PA
  • 2015-2018 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship
  • 2015 SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship
  • 2008 National Security Language Initiative for Youth Summer Language (Egypt/Arabic)                                                                                                                                                                                                            
Graduate Placement Committee

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