Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. I am also a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Political Science Department at Boston University. My research and teaching focus on the international relations of the Middle East with a substantive emphasis on the politics of state formation and colonial legacies, ethnic politics, governance in divided societies, institutions and post-conflict statebuilding. 

 

My current book project, forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2025), titled Structuring Exclusion: Institutions, Grievances, and Ethnic State Capture in Iraq examines the relationship between state institutions, exclusion, and ethnic conflict in Iraq throughout formative statebuilding periods. I trace the longitudinal effects of British colonial institutional development on patterns of ethnic dominance and exclusion from governance across subsequent statebuilding periods. I develop a framework of the ethnic selectorate to endogenize how ethnic elites capture and reinforce ethnic dominance through state institutions to elucidate the processes that structure conflict across time. This project is theoretically grounded in the literature on ethnic conflict, colonial state formation, and governing in divided societies. 

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I am the author of After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, with Valentine Moghadam (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-editor of State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship, and Democratisation, with Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood (I.b. Tauris 2017). 

I received my Ph.D. in politics from the University of Edinburgh, my MA in political science from Wilfrid Laurier University, and BA (Hon) in political science and political philosophy from York University in Toronto.

In 2022, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as Canada Research Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the University of Waterloo. I have also held research fellowships at the Middle East Studies Center at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University, the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to English, I am also fluent in Arabic and Assyrian/Aramaic.

 

I am an avid runner and  immensely enjoy running in Boston and its suburbs.

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