I studied at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Toronto, Jordan, and Oxford before taking my doctorate at Princeton. My research examines categories used to describe Middle Eastern societies. During the fall of 2017 I will be a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, working on problems related to historical databases.

publications

My first book, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (Columbia University Press, 2017), traces the emergence of nationality as a social and legal category between 1880 and 1914.
My latest published essay is “What Ottoman nationality was and was not,” Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3.2 (2016): 277-98. Find the rest of my scholarship, including downloadable PDFs, via my Zotero profile, at Zenodo's repositories, or via my ORCID profile.

Digital history

• I have posted various materials on github.
• I'm running an ongoing undergraduate project digitizing the full content of the Egyptian Gazette for the years 1905-1906.
• I am developing a digital humanities tool called Prosop, for which I received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant in 2011.

Legal History

• I am associate editor (book reviews, non-Americas) of the Law and History Review.
• I was previously a fellow of the Rechtskulturen program (2012-13) and the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History (2011).

Teaching

I teach courses on Egypt, the Middle East, digital history, and socio-legal history. In fall 2017, I am on leave. In spring 2018, I am teaching

• IFS 2116: Digital Microhistory Lab: Alexandria in 1905, a methods class in digital history

• a graduate Preparing Future Professionals seminar

Previous semesters.  Future semesters.

Language sessions

Past semesters: Schedule and Readings 

More information

• My vita.
• My twitter.