I am a historian of the medieval and early modern Middle East, specializing in the Mamluk and Ottoman Levant. I completed my PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto in 2025. I am currently on leave from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University to pursue a residency at the OIB and conduct fieldwork in manuscript libraries in Beirut, Mount Lebanon, and the Damascus region.

Research Project

At OIB, I will pursue my book project, The Levantine Frontier: Mount Lebanon in the Early Modern Mediterranean, which expands my dissertation into a history of Mount Lebanon from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Mount Lebanon had long formed a contested frontier between the Franks and Mamluks, but beginning in the fifteenth century, it became a laboratory of sectarian politics, provincial state formation, and Arabic literary culture. My book argues that changes in Mamluk imperial governance strengthened local clans, allowing them to exercise political authority, sponsor monastic schools, and send young clerics to study in Egypt and Italy. Returning as preachers, teachers, and scholars, these clerics intensified competition among Mount Lebanon’s Christians, turning longstanding confessional differences into a durable basis of sectarian organization. At the same time, clan patronage transformed monasteries into centers of learning and writing that tied the mountain more closely to the cultures of surrounding Islamic cities and Catholic Europe. My book intervenes in histories of empire, confessionalization, and knowledge circulation by showing how marginal and frontier societies became sites where new forms of identity and culture were produced, with aftereffects that extended into the modern period.