A graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan’s Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, she researches and teaches on culture and political economy in the Arab world. She is the author of Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City, Middle Eastern Humanities: An Introduction to Cultures, co-editor of Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring as well as articles on gender, culture, power, and knowledge in the Ottoman and contemporary Middle East. She is currently working on an ethnography of the Syrian migration, and her next project is tentatively entitled Genealogies of ISIS.