I research and teach the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the modern Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am especially interested to understand how Ottomans used new kinds of technical knowledge to transform their society in the decades before World War I. In my first book, The Lighthouse …
I am a historian of technology with a focus on twentieth-century North Africa and the Middle East. My work examines the links between colonial modernization projects, the construction of racialized technical hierarchies, local forms of political contestation and technological labor, and the remaking of urban environments in the region. My research has been funded through …