• 2008, PhD, University of Michigan
• 2005, MA, University of Michigan
• 2003, AB, Princeton University

• Fluency in English, French and classical Arabic
• Proficiency in classical Persian and modern standard Arabic
  
• Reading Knowledge of German and Italian

• Introduction to Islamic Civilization (H200)
  
• Gendering Islamicate History (H200)
  
• Travel in the Islamic Middle East (H392w)

"Singing Slave Girls (Qiyan) at the Abbasid Court", in _Children and Slavery_, eds. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph Campbell (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008).

I am currently revising my dissertation, "Blighted Bodies and Physical in Cairo, Damascus and Mecca, 1400-1550" into a book for publication. This study is at heart a tale of three cities, of friendships among scholars and of texts about bodies. I use the narrative tropes of travel and mobility to investigate circulating discourses of physical difference and disability among scholarly communities in these cities, drawing not only on textual sources (literary, historical, legal, theological), but also on visual and material ones to emphasize the regional and cultural diffusion of disability discourses. I argue, in part, that the centrality of physiognomic categories in Islamic theology and jurisprudence made anomalous bodies threatening to notions of piety and religious authority. All the same, within this embracive community of men connected by the social practices of friendship and academic mentorship, the physically marked functioned as selves, lovers, family members, literary subjects and pious authorities. By analyzing religious and social perspectives of this history, I reveal the thick intertwining of identity and disability in the narratives of these subjectivized bodies.

I am also pursuing projects related to drug use among religious scholars in Mamluk Cairo and domesticity and marriage in Mamluk Damascus.