I am a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. I will be conducting archival and ethnographic research in Lebanon and beyond between 2026 and 2028. I warmly welcome conversations with families connected to the history of sericulture, as well as with those who think and work with silkworms today. Beyond my interest in language and words, I enjoy yoga, hiking, and woodblock engraving.

Research Project

My dissertation offers a historical anthropology of making raw materials in the late Ottoman world, focusing on the inextricably entangled socio-political, economic, and ecological production of silkworm eggs. Drawing on Marxian political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and material culture studies, I ask an often-overlooked question: What, exactly, is a raw material? Grounded in this active process of making, my research examines the everyday, often ephemeral configurations of local capitalism. The project traces a trans-imperial web of connections linking the mulberry groves of Mount Lebanon to scientific laboratories in Ottoman Anatolia and egg markets across the Ottoman-Russian borderlands and East Asia. By combining readings of diverse genres of writing, including petitions, court files, land deeds, and agricultural manuals, with embodied approaches to sericulture, I seek to uncover the modes of thinking and living involved in the process of making.