I specialize in the cultures, history, and literatures of the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean. My book, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: the Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib, analyzes a group of legal consultative texts between Cordoba and the Far Maghrib (what is today Morocco) and argues that legal institutions developed in the latter in response to the social needs of growing urban spaces and the administrative needs of the first Berber-Islamic empire. I am currently working on a second book-length project on the social and cultural history of the reception of displaced populations in the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean: a history of the refugees of the "reconquista." I also translate modern Arabic literature and have written on modern topics including legal reform in Morocco and Egypt.
I received my PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale in 2009. After a two-year dissertation writing fellowship at Willamette University in, Salem, Oregon, I spent five years teaching in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo.
Medieval Mediterranean; Islamic Law and society; history of Islamic world; history of the Maghrib and Islamic Spain; Arabic literature
