Associate Professor of Anthropology
About
I am a cultural anthropologist of the Middle East and North Africa and an award-winning ethnographic filmmaker. My research focuses on the social life of theology in relation to media, ethics and politics as well as race and heritage activism. This focus reflects a conceptual attunement to theologies of difference and emancipatory politics that at once unsettle and reaffirm secular-religious distinctions in nonliberal traditions and within authoritarian contexts.
My first book, The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025), explores the social life of theology in relation to Islamic television production and the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising. Based on fieldwork in the Cairo branch of the world’s first Islamic television channel, the book traces how pious struggles over the forms and ends of Islamic media connected to broader struggles over the forms and ends of a “New Egypt.” Those struggles radically reconfigured both the religious and the revolutionary for millions of ordinary people. Rather than reading the 2011 uprising and its lead up through the conventional “Islamist versus secularist” framework that dominates analyses of authoritarianism in the Arab world, the book takes seriously the internal fractures of Egypt’s Islamic Revival to reconsider what makes a practice virtuous, a public Islamic, a way of life godly.
The Revolution Within received the 2026 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Gold Medal in Religion and an Honorable Mention for the 2026 American Academy of Religion Award for Best Work in the Study of Practices, Communities, or Lived Contexts. (You can learn more about the book in CaMP Anthropology and the New Books Network.)
I have published research articles in American Anthropologist, Arab Media and Society, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Public Culture, and Visual Anthropology Review. My article “Subtitling Islam” won the 2019 Martha Cheung Award for Best Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar and my article “Godly ethnography” was one of the most viewed articles of 2023 in American Anthropologist. Several of my articles have been reprinted in edited collections and my invited essays and commentaries have appeared in Current Anthropology, Middle East Report, Media, Culture & Society, POMEPS, and SSRC’s The Immanent Frame.
My visual and multimodal work is central to my scholarship. My feature documentary Searching for Nubia interweaves interview and observational footage with animation to follow young Nubian heritage activists in Cairo as they organize performances, do community outreach, and debate with elders what it means to keep Nubia alive as “a place inside us.” My animated short Hanina/Homesick reanimates ethnographic photographs of Nubia from the 1960s set to the iconic Nubian displacement song “Waa Hanina” by Sayed Gayer. Hanina/Homesick won Honorable Mention for Best Short at the 2023 Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, and was an official selection at more than twenty festivals, including Annecy, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival.
I have received research grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and Henry Luce Foundation, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays program, the National Science Foundation (graduate research fellowship and doctoral fieldwork grant), the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (doctoral fieldwork and the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film).
In addition to these individual awards, I was PI of “Narrating Nubia: The Social Lives of Heritage,” a three-year University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory project (you can read more about this collaboration in the LSA Magazine feature “Nubia Is a Place Inside of Us”) and co-PI of “The Global Politics of ‘Moderate Islam’” research project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, between 2019-2024.
I am currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled Salvaging Nubia: Ethics, Heritage, and Religious Contestation in the Wake of Displacement. Foregrounding ethics as an overlooked dimension of intangible heritage, it asks how diverse Nubian communities evaluate their religious inheritances through the recasting of salvage ethnography as a sentimental archive of heritage on the one hand and the lived exigencies of Islamic universalism on the other, and how these evaluations shape both remembrances of the past and expectations for the future. In doing so, the book brings the anthropology of Islam into conversation with critical heritage studies. It also provincializes the Euro-American historiography of salvage anthropology by asking how its social life in authoritarian postcolonial settings complicates the stakes of ethnographic refusal versus recognition in ways that differ from liberal settler-colonial ones.
In connection to this project, I produced and curated the 2023 exhibit "The Sentimental Archive: Remembering Nubia through Salvage Anthropology" at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library Gallery
I received the 2026 Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award. My courses cover the anthropology of Islam, religion, media and politics, digital cultures, olfactory culture, and religion and social difference. With Rebecca Wollenberg (Judaic Studies), I co-created the sensory pedagogy program “The Abrahamic Sensorium,” including its virtual adaptation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The program won the 2023 Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize.
I serve as an elected social sciences member of the LSA Curriculum Committee (2024–2027) and on the executive committee of the Global Islamic Studies Center. In addition, I am a faculty affiliate of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the African Studies Center, Arab and Muslim American Studies, the Digital Studies Institute, and the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Between 2014-2017, I was a junior member of the Michigan Society of Fellows.
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt. Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford University Press, 2025.
Recent Journal Articles
"Visualizing Erasure: Comics and Animation from Revolutionary Street Art to Nubian Memories of Displacement in Egypt," co-authored with Sherine Hamdy, Visual Anthropology Review 40, no. 2 (2024): 264–80.
"Can There Be a Godly Ethnography? Islamic Anthropology, Epistemic Decolonization and the Ethnographic Stance," American Anthropologist 125, no. 4 (2023): 746–60.
"Televised Tears: Artifice and Ambivalence in Islamic Preaching," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 41, no. 2 (2021): 153–65.
"The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication," International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 4 (2020): 623–42.
"Television Is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival," Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2018): 233–65. Reprinted in Provocative Images (Leiden University Press, 2023).
"Subtitling Islam: Translation, Mediation, Critique," Public Culture 29, no. 2 (2017): 333–61. Reprinted in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (2022).
Invited Essays and Commentaries (Select)
"Comment on 'What If Anthropology Were a Spiritual Exercise?'" Current Anthropology 67, no. 1 (2026).
"Reckoning with God or with People Talking about God?" Afterword to the special section "Reckoning with God," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 45, no. 1 (2025).
Narrating Nubia Between Sentiment and Solidarity, POMEPS Studies 44 (2021): 81–86.
"Living through Thick Concepts in Revolutionary Egypt," International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 3 (2020): 493–97. Reprinted in SSRC Items, 2021.
"Divine Cosmopolitanism: A Reply," Media, Culture & Society 38 (2016): 64–67.
"The Wretched Revolution," Middle East Report 44, no. 4 (2014): 34–39.
Films
Searching for Nubia (2026, 51 min.). Screening at festivals now.
Hanina/Homesick (2023, 8 min.). Distributed by RAIFILM.
The Women of Tahrir (2011, 3 min.). Best Video, Common Ground 1001 Stories Competition; Jury Award, Three Minute Media Social Issue Film Festival.
Fashioning Faith (2009, 22 min.). Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.
