I am a historian of modern China and the Arab world. My work grew from years of studying languages, living in different regions, and noticing how often the histories I encountered were separated by academic convention even when people, ideas, commodities, and institutions had long crossed those boundaries.
My academic training and professional life have taken me through Beijing, Cairo, Damascus, Washington, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and other research sites. I received graduate training in Middle East Studies and Arabic at the American University in Cairo and later earned my Ph.D. at Georgetown University. My research depends on Chinese- and Arabic-language materials and on an approach to history that treats regions not as sealed containers but as changing worlds produced through contact.
I have taught global history, modern Chinese history, Middle Eastern history, Chinese–Arab relations, and Islam across institutions including Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha, NYU Abu Dhabi, and NYU Shanghai. Across these settings, I have become increasingly committed to experiential teaching that connects historical study to cities, communities, religious institutions, oral histories, and students’ own acts of inquiry.
My current work expands that transregional orientation into the history of medicine and oral history, especially the experiences of breast cancer survivors and caregivers in China and Muslim communities. Across projects, I remain interested in the same larger question: how can history make visible connections—and forms of human experience—that conventional categories leave apart?