I am an Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture at Boston University’s History of Art & Architecture Department.

My research is at the intersection of the built environment (broadly defined), migration, refugee, and camp studies, and Arab and Islamic studies. In my research, I work on a range of interrelated topics: cities, migrants and refugees, Islamic migration, camps, humanitarianism, Third World development, property and land tenure, and (increasingly) colonial and post-colonial partitions, borderlands, and ecology. I’m also very interested in critical methods in architecture and urban studies, as well as in questions of positionality in research and writing.

My writings have appeared in the Journal of Refugee Studies, CSSAME, Change over Time, and elsewhere. Currently, I am working on a book manuscript on the history of refuge in Amman, spanning from late Ottoman times to the war in Syria. My work has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS, the IJURR Foundation, and the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, among others.

I earned my PhD in Architectural History from UC Berkeley in 2022. Before joining BU, I was the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History at UC Davis. Before moving to the US, I held a full-time lecturer position at the German Jordanian University (2012-2016).

I invite you to learn more about my research, writing, and teaching.