About My Work
I am a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Egypt. My research and teaching explore transnational processes and questions of state governance in provincial settings, empire, and the mobility of people, ideas, and goods.
I am currently working on a manuscript titled "Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859-1906: Labor Mobility and the Making of the Suez Canal." In this book, embracing labor migrants who followed domestic as well as international routes, I trace the social and cultural history of the Suez Canal region. I pay particular attention to the different kinds of mobility and circulation that both traversed and wound up in Port Said and the Isthmus of Suez.
My future research will take two directions. One is the social history of public health and medicine in the Suez Isthmus region in the turn of the twentieth century. The other is an exploration of migrants' correspondence, with particular emphasis on the history of motherhood and childhood in the Egyptian context.
I have so far received research support from the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation with the Council for Library and Information Resources, the Zeit Foundation, the Coordinating Council for Women Historians with the Berkshire Conference, and the University of Arizona. My work has so far appeared in venues such as Comparative Studies in History and Society, Journal of Urban History, Rethinking History, and History Compass
Citations
Forthcoming Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859-1906: Labor Mobility and the Making of the Suez Canal, University of California Press.
2021 “Suez: A Hollow Canal in Need of Peopling. Currents and Stoppages in the Historiography, 1859-1956,” History Compass 19-5 (May).
2021 With Mohamed Gamal-Eldin, “Provincializing Egyptian Historiography: De-Centered Geographies, Methodologies, and Sources,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53-1 (January): 107-111.
2021 “Dividing and Ruling a Mediterranean Port-City. The Many Boundaries within Late Nineteenth Century Port Said.” In Multi-ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World. Controversial Heritage and Divided Memories, from the Nineteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, volume 2, by Marco Folin and Heleni Porfyriou, 30-44. New York: Routledge.
2020 “Port Said and Ismailia as Desert Marvels: Delusion and Frustration on the Isthmus of Suez, 1859-1869.” Journal of Urban History 46-3 (May 2020): 622–47. Published online: 9 January 2019.
2017 “Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59-1 (January): 127-153.
Professional Associations
Middle East Studies Association