I am an Associate Professor of the Modern Islamic World in the history department at the University of Antwerp. In 1998, I received my MA in Cultural Anthropology and Education from the University of Heidelberg and completed my PhD with honors in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago in 2005. Before joining the history department at the University of Antwerp in 2016, I held a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of the contemporary Middle East, I focus on the Arab East (Lebanon, Syria, and increasingly Palestine) and Iran. My approach to the region's political history is ethnographic and informed by discussions in postcolonial studies. In the past two decades, I have written two books and various journal articles on expressions of political violence in Lebanon in light of the country’s entanglement with Iran and Syria.
My first book Shi’ite Lebanon. Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities (Columbia University Press, 2008 [reprint 2011]) is about cultural (and political) practices Lebanese Shiite political parties, and Iranian post-revolutionary interlocutors engage in to express their desired level of intimacy. I trace the genealogy of formulating a Shi’ite-specific discourse of Palestinian solidarity through the activities of pre-revolutionary Iranian militants in South Lebanon, demystifying the assumption that Shiite transnational networks began in the 1980ies. Through the lens of official Iranian cultural politics in Lebanon, I also show Iran’s desired contours of influence. The book also discusses Lebanese Shiite's reactions to these Iranian visions, from jokes about Iranian men, mimicking Persian accents, and analyzing school material; I concluded that transnationalism and nationalism do not pose a contradiction and that global networks support, in fact, nationalist aspirations of Islamist movements such as that of Hizbullah in their counter-hegemonic project to present the subaltern community as exemplary citizens of Lebanon.
My second book, Caring Violence. Syrian Authoritarianism and Enforced Disappearances in Lebanon (1976-2005) (Under review) examines Syrian military security violence in Lebanon, in particular, the abduction and transfer of Lebanese citizens to Syria. By unraveling the micro-practices of cross-border enforced disappearances during Syria’s military occupation of Lebanon, I highlight other histories coexisting along the known ' brotherly relation' and thin border argument. Abductions, the book argues, rather than merely aimed at disciplining the victims, were about performing an aspirational history of territorial unity between Lebanon and Syria under the rule of a transnational shadow network managed by the Assad regime. The takeaway from the book is that the regime’s military occupation coexisted with its annexation project. Rather than being one or the other, occupation and annexation ran parallel during those three decades.
My new project deals with East Asian, mainly Japanese and South Korean, official cultural politics in the Middle East. By researching modes of knowledge production from two capitalist neoliberal countries that remain nonetheless at the fringes of the empire when it concerns the Middle East, I intend to add to debates on epistemological racism. I received an FWO long stay abroad grant to conduct the first part of this multidisciplinary and multi-sited research in Japan, focusing on its cultural politics in Lebanon. During my fieldwork in 2025, I am affiliated with TUFS (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies). The second part of the research is conducted in South Korea to understand the process of producing an official cultural policy on Palestine.