Academic Bio
I am a historian who works on the social and cultural history of the Middle East. My research and teaching interests include Armenian communities of the Middle East, Middle East diasporas, the contemporary history of Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, and how marginal members of society use state and local power in an effort to claim political and social agency. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in February 2011 and am currently Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Through an examination of specific episodes of crisis and tension, my work challenges current scholarship on Armenians, Lebanon, Diaspora, and the Cold War and contributes to these fields by demonstrating how Armenians used the sectarian system of Lebanon and Cold War tensions for their own means.