Originally from New England, I received my BA, first class, in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Oxford in 2013. For my undergraduate dissertation, I translated al-Jāḥiẓ's epistle 'The Boast of the Blacks over the Whites' and wrote about the perception of race in early Islamic society. In my MA/MSc thesis, 'Egypt and Her Inhabitants: Translation and Race in the Journals al-Muqtaṭaf and al-Hilāl, 1885-1917', I explored how race, and specifically concepts of 'Arab-ness' and 'black-ness' were re-thought and changed in Egypt in the intellectual context of European-inflected scientific modernity and biological racism/racialism. My other research interests include cultural links of Sudan to the broader Arab world, Arab identities and genealogies, and the reception of premodern Arab-Islamic literature and intellectual heritage in the modern Arab world.
