My research centers on the intellectual and religious history of the late Ottoman empire and modern Middle East. Building on the abundant global history scholarship on the Ottoman empire, I am interested in the modern concepts and frameworks that came to structure Ottoman and post-Ottoman society including religion, race, history, mind, reason, world, and self, in addition to the translational problematics that the historical study of such concepts entails.

Secular transformations in the late Ottoman Empire

In my current book project, The Ottoman Secular: History and Difference among the Suryani, 1839-1935, I draw on a unique set of communal sources to explore how one minority community negotiated the secularizing transformations of the late Ottoman Empire. The central such transformation that animates the book is the rise of a new concept of difference inhering in the term “millet”—a concept that represented the emergence of a new understanding of difference in late Ottoman society as well as, I argue, a distinctly modern obsession with difference itself. At the root of this obsession was a new understanding of history—accompanied by a new set of historicist concepts including “religion,” “race,” “politics,” “culture,” and so forth—to which the Suryani, like so many other communities across the empire, had to adapt. At stake, the book contends, was nothing less than the viability of “Suryani” as a category nominating a distinct way of life.

This work has led me to pursue related theoretical projects on history, modernity, psychoanalysis, and the West, as well as historical investigations into modern Arabic and Turkish treatments of the histories of Islam and Christianity. I have been guided in this work by ongoing collaborations with anthropologists, as in a co-authored article published in History of the Present in 2022.

Before coming to Warwick, I spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project “Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East” at the University of Oxford, where I was also a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College. I received my PhD in History from Yale University in 2023.