CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
University of California Los Angeles (2023) PhD, Anthropology
Dissertation: Spatial Relations: Post-War Reconstruction and the Afterlives of Jewish Terrains in Lebanon (Professors Susan Slyomovics and Laurie Kain Hart, committee co-chairs)
New York University (2014) MA, Near Eastern Studies
Smith College (2012) BA, Religion & Middle East Studies
Alexandria University (2010) C.V. Starr School in the Middle East
Middlebury Language School (2010) Arabic
PUBLICATIONS
Monographs
Spatial Relations: Post-War Reconstruction and the Afterlives of Jewish Terrains in Lebanon (in progress)
Reimagining Jewish Life in the Modern Middle East, 1800-Present: Culture, Society, and History (Orit Bashkin, Michelle Campos, Orit Ouakinine-Yekutieli, Menashe Anzi, Lior Sternfeld, organizing committee), co-authored manuscript, forthcoming (Stanford University Press)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“’It Was our Home and Sadly we Will Never Return:’ Nostalgia and the Circulation of Images on Lebanese-Jewish Virtual Communities,” Jewish Social Studies, 28:2 (2023)
Public Scholarship & Engagement
“The Jewish Quarter of Saïda: Intertwined Displacements and Memories of Absence in a Southern Lebanese City,” The Metropole (May 2024)
“The Taste of Displacement: an Interview with Iraqi-Jewish Artist Michael Rakowitz,” Protocols (March 2020)
“Fidelity to Hybridity: Returning to Ella Shohat’s Arab-Jew,” Protocols (August 2018)
“Holy Land: Zionism Excavates its Secular Justification from the Jerusalem Dirt,” The New Inquiry (April 2015)
“Settled History: Tourist Attractions and Imagined Futures in Israel’s Settlement Museums,” The New Inquiry (November 2015)
Selected Media
“House of Stone: Lebanon’s Jewish Communities,” Joy and Conversation: Jewish History and Culture [Podcast] (July 20, 2021)
“Wadi Abu Jamil: Glimpses of Beirut’s Jewish Past in Today’s Inaccessible Neighborhood,” Walking Tour, Beirut, Lebanon (May 2019)
FELLOWSHIPS & ACADEMIC DISTINCTIONS
Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2022-23)
UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship (2022-23)
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Summer Dissertation Writing Fellowship (2021)
Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Fellowship (2020)
Resident Doctoral Fellowship, Orient-Institut Beirut | Max Weber Foundation (2018-19)
UCLA Center for Jewish Studies Maurice Amado Fellowship in Sephardic Studies (2018)
American Academy for Jewish Research Grant (2018)
UCLA Center for International Studies Fieldwork Grant (2018)
UCLA Department of Anthropology Research Grant (2018)
UCLA Graduate Division Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship (2017-18)
UCLA Graduate Division Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship (2017)
UCLA Department of Anthropology Department Research Grant (2017)
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies | US Department of Education Graduate Assistance for Areas of National Need (GAANN) Fellowship (2016-17)
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Bluma Appel Grant (2016)
UCLA Department of Anthropology Department Research Grant (2016)
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Maurice Amado Fellowship in Sephardic Studies (2016)
NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies Research Grant (2014)
NYU | US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship in Arabic (2012-14)
PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATIONS
Invited Talks
“Experiences from the Field: Oral History and Ethnographic Practice,” Relations in the Ideoscape, Orient-Institut Beirut (May 2019)
Panels Organized
“Return of Objects, or Objects of Return? Meanings of Return in Material Heritage Research” roundtable co-organizer, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Annual Meeting (July 2024)
“Ethnography, Compounding Crises, and the World to Come: What Can Anthropology Learn from the Case of Lebanon?” roundtable organizer and chair, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (November 2021)
“Borders and Gardens: Avi Moghrabi’s Cinema Verité and Possibilities for a Future Levant.” Panel: Imagining Alternative Commons from the Levant, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (October 2021)
“Dwelling in Absence: Difference, Political Aspirations, and the Legacy of Lebanon’s Jews.” Panel: Jewish Difference and Identity-Making in the Modern Eastern Mediterranean, Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting (December 2021)
“Bounded Images: Nationalism, Nostalgia, and the Coffee Table Book-as-Archive.” Panel: Memory and Mediation in Lebanon: Commodifying and Consuming Images of the Past, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (November 2018)
Papers Presented
“Walking the Wadi: Navigating and Narrating Beirut’s Former Jewish Neighborhood.” Panel: Spaces of Encounter, Entanglement and Belonging in the MENA, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Annual Meeting (July 2024)
“Whose Jewish Sidon?: On Absence, Memory, and the Legacy of the Jewish Community in South Lebanon.” Panel: At the Edges of Lebanon: Communities and the Spatial Politics of Infrastructural Development, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (November 2023)
“Jewish Sidon: Memory, Displacement, and Absence in a South Lebanese City.” International Seminar on Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, Parkes Institute, University of Southampton & Institute for Historical Research at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of London (June 2023)
Roundtable participant, “Heterogeneity and the MENA Region: A ’Minority’ Report on an Ongoing Project.” roundtable participant, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (October 2020)
“Jewish Terrains and Urban Space in Post-War Beirut.” at Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence conference, University of Birmingham (September 2018)
“Mirror Images: Spatial Destruction, Labor, and Agency in Two Naqab Bedouin Communities.” Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (November 2016)
“Tourism Post-1948: Luxury Commodities, Diaspora Tourism, and Fostering Settler-Colonial Sentimentality.” at Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (November 2015)
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES)
Association for Jewish Studies (AJS)