Assistant Professor of Anthropology
About
I am a cultural anthropologist of the Middle East and North Africa. My research interests span the intersections of religion, media, and politics as well as questions of race, indigeneity and heritage activism in the region. I am also a visual and multimodal ethnographer.
Ethnographic Scholarship
As an anthropologist of Islam, I am interested in what a methodological attunement to theological contestations over the definition of the "Islamic" reveals about the everyday dynamics of religious belonging and boundary-making. My first book (published by Stanford University Press) explores the social life of theology in relation to both Islamic television production and the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising. Based on fieldwork in the Cairo branch of the world's first Islamic television channel, it traces the ways in which pious struggles over the forms and ends of Islamic media articulated with broader struggles over the forms and ends of a "New Egypt," radically reconfiguring both the religious and the revolutionary for millions of ordinary people. Taking seriously the internal fractures of Egypt's Islamic Revival offers new insight on the intersections of religion and politics in the region beyond the conventional "Islamist versus secularist" frameworks that dominate analysis of authoritarianism in the Arab world. You can read an interview with me about the book here and listen to an interview about the book and the process of researching and writing it here.
I have published several journal articles focused on various aspects of Islamic media production in Egypt. This includes on subtitling on Islamic television as a form of critique (Public Culture), on what debates over new forms of Islamic media reveal about shifting theological evaluations of the religious and the secular (Cultural Anthropology), on how the conceptual history of Islamic media provincializes Euro-American decolonizing projects (International Journal of Middle East Studies) and on the changing criteria of ritual aptness in Islamic preaching in a digital media age (Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East) .
My most recent journal article asks how the idea of a "Godly ethnography" might unsettle in generative ways the taken-for-granted secular horizon of calls to decolonize anthropology (American Anthropologist).
My new research examines ethics as an overlooked aspect of intangible heritage for marginalized and racialized groups. Focusing on Nubians in Egypt, I aim to understand how internal community contestations over what it means to be properly Nubian today take shape between the widespread recasting of salvage ethnography as a sentimental archive of collective indigenous memory and the widespread community valorization of Gulf Salafi religious sensibilities as universally apt. In doing so, I center indigeneity and race as significant, if often overlooked, terrains of ethical contestation with theological stakes in the Arabic-speaking world while adding a comparative ethnographic lens to their critical theorization beyond paradigmatic North Atlantic histories and structures.
Multimodal Projects
I am in post-production on a new ethnographic film about Nubian culture, shot between 2015-2019. Interweaving live action with animation, the film follows a group of young Nubian in Cairo as they organize performances, conduct community outreach, hold meetings, give media interviews, celebrate milestones, and debate with elders what it means to keep Nubia alive as “a place inside us.” In doing so, the film sheds light on enduring anthropological themes of difference, belonging, and social transformation. I explore some of these issues in a essay reflecting on the community politics of narrating Nubia between solidarity and sentimentalism, including within my own family histories.
A second multimodal project centers on the social life of the visual ethnography of Nubia and has resulted in a short animated film, "Hanina/Homesick." The film examines how Nubians in Egypt remember the loss of this homeland when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1964. The basis of the animation consists of ethnographic photos of Nubia taken by anthropologists in the 1960s. These photos are an important archive for Nubians seeking both to provide a thicker account of displacement and to revitalize traditions and languages for new generations. We reimagined these photos as visual accompaniment to an iconic displacement song to ask what it could look like to salvage sentiment from salvage anthropology. You can read more about this collaboration in the LSA Magazine feature "Nubia is a Place Inside Us."
"Hanina/Homesick" won honorable mention for best short at the Society of Visual Anthropology Film Festival and was an official 2024 selection of Annecy, the Margaret Mead, and Arab American National Museum festivals, among others.
My previous documentaries include Fashioning Faith, a behind-the-scenes look at the intersections of Muslim-American piety and sartorial design, and the three-minute digital story The Women of Tahrir.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses in the anthropology of Islam, on religion, media and politics, on the ethnography of digital cultures, and on olfactory culture. I have offered graduate seminars on religion, critique and the secular as well as on the ethnography of Muslim societies. With Rebecca Wollenberg in Judaic Studies I am co-convener of the sensory pedagogy program "The Abrahamic Sensorium," including its adaptation for pandemic-era virtual learning. This initiative won the 2023 Provost Teaching Innovation Prize.
Whether in large lecture classes or small seminars, my teaching is interactive and collaborative. Students learn to think in new ways about familiar topics and to engage with the nuances of unfamiliar ones through structured discussions, multi-modal assignments with real-world stakes, and through different forms of writing, from memoirs to op-eds.
