Welcome! I am an Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. I am also a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Political Science Department at Boston University. My research and teaching focus on the international relations of the Middle East with a substantive emphasis on the politics of state formation and colonial legacies, ethnic politics, governance in divided societies, institutions and post-conflict statebuilding. 

 

My forthcoming book, Structuring Exclusion: Institutions, Grievances, and Ethnic State Capture in Iraq  (Oxford University Press, 2026), examines the relationship between elites, state institutions, exclusion, and ethnic state capture in Iraq throughout formative statebuilding periods. I develop a historical institutionalist framework to explain how ethnic elites rely on state institutions to entrench group dominance and affect power-sharing outcomes in divided, post-colonial societies. Through a systematic analysis of elite institutional dominance strategies across critical statebuilding junctures, the book posits that ethnic grievances and group mobilization are informed by past collective experiences with exclusion and repression as causal mechanisms that structure communal conflict overtime. Using Iraq as a case study, I develop a novel theory of ethnic state capture that links elite institutional choices to strategies of political control. 

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I am also the author of After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Valentine Moghadam (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-editor of State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship, and Democratisation, with Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood (I.b. Tauris 2017). 

I received my Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Edinburgh, my MA in political science from Wilfrid Laurier University, and BA (Hon) in political science and political philosophy from York University in Toronto.

In 2022, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as Canada Research Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the University of Waterloo. I have also held research fellowships at the the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, the Middle East Studies Center at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University, the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to English, I am also fluent in Arabic and Assyrian/Aramaic.

 

I am an avid runner and immensely enjoy running in Boston and its suburbs.

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