Histories across regions, languages, and lived experience

Invisible Entanglements

Chinese–Arab Connections in the Age of Global Empires (under contract with Columbia University Press)

Invisible Entanglements: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Age of Global Empires examines connections between Chinese and Arab societies from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Drawing on Chinese- and Arabic-language sources and research conducted across China, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, the project asks how seemingly distant worlds became connected through the networks and infrastructures of global empire.

Rather than treating China and the Arab world as self-contained regions, the book follows people, texts, commodities, institutions, and political ideas as they moved through British, French, Japanese, and other imperial systems. These mediated encounters reveal both the possibilities and inequalities built into modern global connectivity.

Islam, Muslims & transregional East Asia

Across my research and teaching, I explore Islam and Muslim communities in China as part of a wider transregional history linking East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. I am particularly interested in religious travel, translation, education, intellectual exchange, and the ways Muslim actors navigated both Chinese and global political worlds.

This strand of my work grows from a broader commitment to studying East Asian history beyond national containers and to placing Chinese Muslim experiences within conversations in Islamic studies and global history.

Medicine, illness & care

My next major research project turns to the history of medicine, oral history, and the lived experiences of women with breast cancer in China, including Chinese Muslim women. It examines the intersections of biomedical treatment, traditional medicine, religion, gender, work, family, intimacy, and caregiving.

The project builds on oral-history research with breast cancer survivors and caregivers in Shanghai and the United Arab Emirates. By bringing Chinese and Muslim experiences into a literature still heavily centered on Europe and North America, the project contributes to an emerging global history of cancer while treating patients and caregivers as historical knowledge-makers in their own right.

Selected publications