I am a PhD candidate in the NYU Department of Sociology. My research follows the everyday lives of a group of young Syrian men from the outskirts of Damascus as they work to build and sustain lives in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley. I use life-history interviews and ethnographic methods to explore how displacement and exile reconfigure their gendered definitions of self and morality, experiences of agency, and orientations towards the future.

My book project, No Country for Young Men: Masculinity and Migrant Futures in Lebanon, is under advance contract at the University of Chicago Press, and my writing has been published in Ethnography, Humanity, Contexts, and the edited volume Refugees as City-Makers. My articles have won awards from the ASA’s Global and Transnational Sociology (GATS), International Migration (IM), and Human Rights sections as well as the Association for the Anthropology of Policy. My research has received fellowship funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Weber Stiftung, and the NYU Gallatin Urban Democracy Lab.

Teaching and mentoring are central elements of my academic identity. I currently teach in the NYU Sociology Department and the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, where I also designed the research tutorial for a community-based learning fellowship that supports urban social justice organizations in New York City. In 2022, I received the NYU Dean’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in the Social Sciences.

I received my MA in Sociology from NYU (2018), my BS from Georgetown University in International Politics and Arab Studies (2011), and completed advanced Arabic language training at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA).

My non-academic interests include cats and foreign fiction.