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. 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 Boston University, 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 also have experience in architecture and urban practice. In 2012, I co-founded Arini, a socially engaged architecture practice, and herskhazeen.com, an online magazine for urbanism, architecture, and design in the Arab region. With Arini, I co-edited a book titled Mapping Jabal Al Nathif (2014). I worked on small-scale, socially engaged architecture projects in Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps, as well as on curatorial projects.

I have also worked on various urban development and heritage documentation projects in Jordan, Palestine, Yemen, Libya, and Abu Dhabi.

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