Introduction

I am a social-economic historian of the Ottoman Levant and Arabian Gulf and am interested in studying how economic and market constraints shaped laws and political organization in the early modern period. I draw on my prior working experience in Islamic banking and have a continued interest in the field of Islamic Economics. My dissertation, Before Banks: Credit, Society, and Law in Sixteenth-Century Palestine and Syria (2018), fills the historical gap in tracing the Mamluk antecedents to the radical Ottoman legal and economic credit institutions and practices of the sixteenth century and provides a nuanced social-legal history of how instruments such as the mu‘āmala and cash-waqfs developed in the Levant.         

Qualifications

2018: Ph.D. in History, University of California Santa Barbara

2011: M.A. in Religious Studies, University of California Santa Barbara

1998: BA in Management, Clark University

Languages

Arabic – Native

French and Spanish – intermediate reading proficiency