I am a historian of the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. I am especially interested in violence and memory, urban histories and settler-colonialism. My first book, "Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope" (2023) offers a public history intervention to the question of Palestine, and specifically to the history of the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population. The book explores the fluctuating ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. These creative assemblages offer new understanding about the role of history in everyday politics and its liberatory potential.
My next book project, tentatively titled "Experimental Occupation," looks at Israel's first occupation of the Gaza Strip in the wake of the Suez Crisis in 1956. While this occupation only lasted 125 days, it entailed multiple, and often contradictory, approaches for the control and management of a newly acquired territory and its hostile population. The 1956 occupation offered Israel an opportunity to experiment governing a subject, non-citizen, Palestinian population. It is here that the military proposed the creation of “civilian administration” apparatus, that will oversee aspects of everyday life of the population. This administration would ostensibly be separate from the military per-se, in charge of security affairs. The Gaza Strip is also where the Israeli military developed its open-fire rules, which continued to be publicly debated today, as well as its methods of counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering. After the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip on March 1, 1957, former military government and other Department of Defense officials draw conclusions and lessons from those 125 days of occupation. Notably, many of the lessons learned from the 1956-7 occupation were later implemented in Israel’s post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and contributed to its longevity.

I previously taught at the University of Toronto, North Carolina State University and the College of the Holy Cross.
A committed vegan, I am an animal rights advocate and used to volunteer at Toronto Cat Rescue.
I live in Worcester with my three cats, Sookie, Shlomo and Jon Snow.