I teach the Middle East from multiple perspectives and a wide array of sources, from classical texts to social media. I believe passionately that the classroom is a space of curiosity, open dialogue, and critical thinking. I am committed to building a learning environment where students engage deeply with different viewpoints and experiences. In my teaching, the Middle East is a site of nuance and complexity, not rigid categories and polarization.

As a scholar, I explore the intersections between politics and popular culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. In my current book project, I am writing a new history of the Arab cultural response to the shattering June 1967 loss to Israel through uncensored Lebanese magazines and novels that emerged immediately after the war but have been entirely neglected by scholars. In The Politics of Melodrama: The Political and Cultural Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Stanford, 2025), I offer a new history of dissent in 1950s and 60s Egypt by linking the work of perhaps the most popular Arabic writer of the twentieth century, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, to his highly consequential yet little known personal relationship with Nasser himself. In Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (Indiana, 2013), which won the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize, I investigate the unexpected intersections between the state and new forms of police entertainment to shape public perceptions of Morocco's political transition during the 1990s and early 2000s.

I have also translated six Arabic novels into English, from Moroccan police novels to the classics of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous.