Education

  • Harvard University, PhD in Social Anthropology (2016) / Secondary Degree in Critical Media Practice:  A View from the View

  • American University of Beirut, MA in Middle Eastern Studies (2006)

  • Boston University, BA in International Relations (2003)


RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS

Tourism / Migration / Mobility / Gender
Digital Scholarship / Digital Humanities / Visual Cultures / Archives / Collaborative Research
Modern Middle East: Lebanon / Syria / Egypt / GCC


University Appointments & Teaching

New York University - Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

  • Director of Graduate Studies: 9/2018 - Current

  • Clinical Assistant Professor: 9/2021 - Current

  • Associated Faculty in Middle East & Islamic Studies: 4/2023 - Current

  • Affiliate Faculty in Anthropology: 10/2019 - Current

  • Acting Director of Kevorkian Center: 4/2020 - 9/2021

  • Faculty Fellow: 9/2018 - 3/2020

University of Pittsburgh - Visiting Assistant Professor in Global Studies & Anthropology. 2017 - 2018

Harvard University - Bok Writing Fellow & Social Anthropology Research Fellow. 2016 - 2017

Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar - Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology. Spring 2015

 


Fellowships / Awards / Affiliations

  • CO-PI on Department of Education: Foreign Language and Area Studies Grant at Kevorkian Center ($260,000/year). 2022 - 2026

  • CO-PI on Department of Education: National Resource Center Grant at Kevorkian Center ($300,000/year). 2022 - 2026

  • Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in the Social Sciences (June - July fully funded residency). 2022

  • NYU Digital Seed Grant: Sight/Site/Cite ($19,500). 2022

  • NYU Teaching Innovation Award (Spring 2020) for course Visual Cultures of the Middle East. 2020

  • Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in the Social Sciences (June - August fully funded residency). 2019

  • Mellon Foundation Grant, Critical Media Practice: Production Grant supporting A View from the View. 2016

  • Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Derek Bok Center for Teaching, Harvard University. 2015 & 2013

  • ZEIT – Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, Hamburg: Settling Into Motion PhD Fellow. 2013-2015

  • Harvard University, Department of Anthropology: Teschmacher Award. 2013 & 2012

  • Wenner-Gren Foundation: Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. 2011-2012

 

    • Mophradat Grant for Artists. Full funding for the Digital Methodologies initiative. 2017-2018 

    • Affiliate Researcher, Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  Harvard University. 2016-2017

    • Social Science Fellow at the Center for Writing and Communicating Ideas.  Harvard University. 2016-2017

    • Bok Writing Fellow, Social Anthropology.  Harvard University. 2016-2017

    • Mellon Foundation Grant, Critical Media Practice: Production Grant for: A View from the View. 2016

    • History Design Studio | Hutchins Center - Production Grant for: A View from the View. 2015

    • Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Derek Bok Center for Teaching, Harvard University. 2015 & 2013

    • Harvard University, Dissertation Completion Fellowship. 2014-2015

    • Cora Du Bois Fellowship: Summer Writing Fellowship. 2014

    • Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA) Best graduate student-organized  panel at the American Anthropological Association. Co-organizer of panel. 2012

    • American University of Beirut, Center for Behavioral Research: Research Associate. 2010-2012

    • Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University: William Jones 1900 Scholarship. 2007-2012


DIGITAL / Visual / AUDIO Projects

Digital Forays & Global Uprising: As Acting Director of the Kevorkian Center (2020-2021) I created two zoom series (+25 events with over 120 invited guests) which were integrated into my teaching. The 22 MA/PhD students (in 4 groups) were asked to create “extensions” for each event, which required them to write reflections, assemble media & resources, and create public facing additions to the virtual panels. In this way, I struck upon a novel method for cohort building and integrating asynchronous material into the classroom that could serve as a model for public scholarship in a time of distance and remote teaching. The student extensions culminated in the publication of two websites Digital Forays (www.digitalforays.com) and Global Uprising (www.theglobaluprising.com).

Visualizing the Middle East (NYU): is the expanded course website for a NYU Graduate course from Spring 2020 that examines changing technologies of image capture/(re)production/circulation in the Middle East from the turn of the century through today. This class is unique in that it asks the students not to write a final paper - but to identify a “problem collection” of visual material related to their research in which they will historicize, contextualize, and build an argument & exploration through a digital platform. This is akin to digital storytelling (or a visual essay) and this process forces students to explore the relationship of text/image. This website is a syllabus, but also used weekly to teach skills & techniques on the platform where students will build their own sites. (www.visualizingthemiddleeast.com)

Anthrowrites: With a select group of undergrad concentrators, across a year long course, we created and designed an interface that addressed how freshman enter a discipline (Social Anthropology & Archeology) and learn to “write” and “read” in the norms of that field. We produced a student driven interface that addresses research design and methodology to issues of ethics, and the idea of writing-as-thinking through one's work. This year long workshop/course was about making: identifying the problems, conceptualizing larger goals, and creating a product that was realized through various digital iterations across the weeks. www.anthrowrites.com (1500 unique visitors/month)

 

  • Reimagining the Monograph:  a 12 month working group that aims to gather 7-10 junior faculty/advanced PhD candidates, selected via an open Call for Participation, who work on the Middle East and have digital components that are central to their research. The group will collaborate and collectively envision ways for digital research components that are mocked up, partially built, or still just imagined can intersect and integrate into each participant’s developing book monograph projects. “The Monograph” as a genre is a key academic product, even more important as a benchmark for our professional academic advancement. Yet, how can we push the boundaries of this genre to account for digital work that provides key insights of our research agenda beyond the physical page? This project emerges from the dissonance that many junior faculty now straddle: producing and engaging new types of scholarship, exploring new methods, and final projects that do not neatly fit into the boundaries of traditional academic production and benchmarks for advancement in academic positions. (forthcoming www.reimaginingthemonograph.com).

    Digital Methodologies: is the developing course website for a NYU Graduate course (Digital Methodologies in Middle Eastern Studies) which is a survey of artistic, academic, and activist production of digital material over the last 15 years in the Middle East - as well as workshops that introduce and problematize certain “Digital Humanities” tools and methods to students. The course explored the landscape of changing production and dissemination of research in the region, while also addressing how graduate students can think digitally in their own work. (forthcoming on www.digitalmethodologies.com)

    View from the View: explores tourism ephemera and the process of creating meta-data around visual material.  The project deals with issues of composition, “viewsheds,” and landscape as they relate to place-making through tourism and memory. (forthcoming in 2026: www.viewfromtheview.com)

    Declassified Levant: is an online edited volume that will explore declassified documents from the State Department in Lebanon from 1930-1962. 30 documents, of particular importance and oddity will be reproduced in their entirety and paired with commissioned contributions from academics and artists whose work aligns with aspect of this document, historical moment, or series of issues. This marriage of document + “open-ended contextualization" by scholars/artists will be a chance to start conversations, view what was once hidden through classified material (then buried in archives), and think through the craft of various eras of state-making. (forthcoming in 2027: www.declassifiedlevant.com)

    Audio
    عیونك مذبحین (Your Eyes are Slaughterers). Accompanied by a paper,” Heightened Anticipation: Sensing, Sound, and Silence in the Dark,” presented at the American Anthropological Association in Denver, December 2015. Sponsored by the Society for Visual Anthropology on a panel entitled: ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCESS.

    Video
    الحل رومانسى  (El Hal Romancy). Art direction and shooting for official music video of Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila. 2011.
    Men with Two Eyes. Ethnographic Short Video made via Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Shot in Beirut & Tripoli, Lebanon in 2009-2010


Publications



Presentations & Papers & Conferences

2022

  • Demystifying the Methods of Digital Middle East Projects. Middle Eastern Studies Association Annual Conference. Denver, Colorado. Dec 2022

  • Engaging Geography in the Humanities - Accepted as a participant for 3 week NEH funded workshops at Northeastern University. June/July 2022

  • Queering Masculinities in the Middle East and South Asia. Yale University - Macmillan Center on Middle Eastern Studies, closed workshop by invitation. March 2022

2021

2020

  • THINKING THROUGH A DIGITAL ARCHIVE. “The Afterlives of Past Disquiet. Legacies, Unwritten Histories and Transnational Solidarity.” University of Zurich.

  • First Directions of Digital Components to Research. Organizer & Chair of Thematic Conversation at Middle Eastern Studies Association.

  • Fieldwork in the Time of COVID: Challenges and Possibilities. American Anthropological Association Conference - Middle East Section Special Event.

  • Experiential Learning in the Remote Instruction Environment. TEACHING INNOVATION CONFERENCE ARTS & SCIENCE. New York University.

  • Indulging the Visual: Pushing the Relationship between Scholarly Text & Images. Digital Humanities in Arabic. Doha Institute for Graduate Studies - Qatar.

2018

  • The Materiality of Historical Views of Tourism in Lebanon. Panel: Memory and Mediation in Lebanon: Commodifying and Consuming Images of the Past. Middle Eastern Studies Association. New Orleans, LA.

2017

  • "Hotels that Hail: Commercialized Hospitality, Infrastructures, and an Industry." Conference: ARCHITECTURE ET TOURISME. FICTIONS, SIMULACRES, VIRTUALITES. Sorbonne. Paris, France.

  • "It’s all in the Blues: Watermarks, Re-circulation, and Tracking." Conference: SIZE MATTERS: Knowledge, Storage, and the History of Compression. Harvard University.

  • "Cascades of Displacement: Kurdish Syrian Migrant Men in Beirut" Conference: Displacement and the Making of the Modern World. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Brown University.

    "Historical Views of Tourism in Lebanon: From Metadata to Interface, A View from the View." Panel: Rethinking Photographic Archives Online. College Art Association Conference. NYC, New York.

 

  • 2016

    • "HISTORICAL VIEWS OF TOURISM IN LEBANON: From Metadata to Interface, A View from the View." Invited Talk at the Tourism Studies Working Group & Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley.

    • "Of Cars, Bridges, Rivers, and Borders: Syrian (Kurdish) Men in Naba’a." Panel: Cities & Histories at the Periphery: Borj Hammoud of Greater Beirut, 1970 - 2016. Middle Eastern Studies Association. Boston.

    •  "Meteorology of Affect: Tourism, Hospitality, and Infrastructures of Pleasure in Lebanon."  Working Group: Infrastructure in/of the Middle East, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.

    • " The Creation of a Season: Sensuality, Sensibilities, and the 'Summer' in Lebanese Tourism." Invited Talk in the Media Studies Program, American University of Beirut.

    2015

    • "Self, Skin, & Space: Changing Embodiment through Smartphones in Egypt & Lebanon." Conference:  “Corporeality in Arab Public Culture: The State of the Field.”  Co-sponsored by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities (NIAS) & the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Wassenaar, Netherlands.

    • "Heightened Anticipation: Sensing, Sound and Silence in the Dark." American Anthropological Association panel sponsored by the Society for Visual Anthropology. Panel:  ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCESS, Denver.

    • "Archive of Mobility: Visualizing Tourism in the Middle East." Workshop: Beautiful Data II. Harvard University metaLAB & Getty Foundation, 10 Day Workshop. Cambridge.

    • “Anthropology of a Season: The ‘Summer,’ The Senses, and Tourism in Lebanon.” Department of Geography, University of Geneva: Worlds of Desire: The Eroticization of Tourist Sites. Geneva, Switzerland. June

    • "Smartphones, Data Plans, & 'Mediated Immediacy' 'in the context of Lebanon." Sponsored by the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute in Cairo, Copenhagen University and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania: Media and Visual Cultures Workshop in Contemporary Arab Societies. Cairo, Egypt. June.

    • “The Reproduction of the ‘Golden Age:’ Memory, Materiality, and Postcards in Lebanon.” Swiss Society for Folklore Studies & Swiss Society for Ethnology: Framing, Compiling, Sampling: Sensory Practices in Cultural Analysis. Basel, Switzerland. 

    • “Tourism, Mobility and Imagined Freedom in Beirut.” Brown University: 2015 Engaged Scholarship Conference: Sexuality and Queer Imaginaries in the Middle East. Providence,RI.

    • “Historical “Visions” of Tourism in Qatar: The Role of Hotels, Heritage & Hospitality.” Texas A&M University in Qatar: Third Annual Liberal Arts International Conference. Doha, Qatar.

    2014

    • “Intimate Hotels: Producing the Lebanese State through Tourism.” Wenner-Gren Foundation & Issam Fares Institute:Beyond State Failure: New Anthropological Perspectives On The Everyday State In Lebanon. American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

    • “‘The Country is on Our Backs’: Placemaking, Hope, and Labor of Syrian Migrants in Beirut.” ZEIT-Stiftung Migration Studies: ‘Settling Into Motion’ PhD Symposium. Berlin, Germany.

    2013

    • “Privileging Tourism: Infrastructure, Access, and Defining ‘Tourists’ in Lebanon.” American Anthropological Association Conference. Co-Organizer of panel: Connection/Disconnection: Material and Social Infrastructures in MENA Cities. Chicago, IL.

    • “Privileging Tourism: Infrastructure, Access, and Defining ‘Tourists’ in Lebanon.” Middle East Studies Association Conference. Co-organizer of panel: Anthropological Approaches to Urban Infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa. New Orleans, LA.

    • “Metaphors of Movement & Mitigated Mobility: Tourists, Emigrants, and Migrant Workers in Lebanon.” ZEIT-Stiftung Migration Studies: ‘Settling Into Motion’ PhD Symposium. Hamburg, Germany.

    • “Contested Desires: ‘Allowance,’ Mobility, and Tourism in Beirut.” Center for American Studies & Center for Arab and Middle East Studies: Sexual Sovereignty: Citizenship, Governmentality, Territory. Beirut, Lebanon.

    • “Hierarchy of Citizenship: Kurdish Identity, Lebanon, and the Syrian State.” Texas A&M Qatar: Ethical Engagements with Globalization, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism. Doha, Qatar.

    2012

    • “Unsaid Movements: Rethinking Politicized Narratives of Syrian Migrant Men in Lebanon.” American Anthropological Association: Co-organizer for panel: Movement, Mobility, Displacement: Migratory Imaginaries of the City. San Francisco, CA.

    • “Unsaid Movements: Rethinking Politicized Narratives of Syrian Migrant Men in Lebanon” George Washington University: The Minority Experience in the Middle East. Washington DC.

    • “The Mobility of Desires in Beirut." American University of Beirut: Center for Behavioral Research. Beirut, Lebanon.

    2011

    • “Becoming Beiruti: Syrian Migrant Men Coming of Age in Lebanon.” Middle East Studies Association: Panelist on: Coming of Age: Rethinking Youth and Childhood in MENA. New Orleans, LA. 

    • reREPLACE BEIRUT: Roundtable Discussant. 98-Weeks Art Space. 

    • “Becoming Beiruti: Syrian Migrant Men Coming of Age in Lebanon.” American University of Beirut & Issam Fares Institute & Goethe Institute: Youth Sexuality and Self-Expression in the Arab World. Beirut, Lebanon. 

    2009

    • “Masculinity, Hierarchies and the ‘Bear:’ Changing Gender Identities in Lebanon and Syria.” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & Sawyer Seminar at UNC Chapel Hill: Gender, Minorities, and Constitutions. Chapel Hill, NC.