I am a social and material historian of the Middle East, interested in the formation of the Islamic state, documentary culture, and the intersection of Byzantine and Islamic law. My research focuses on social, material, and global history approaches, asking how premodern practitioners and consumers of law engaged with the material form of legal documents (most of them written on papyrus, potsherds, and paper), how material scarcity and documentary practices governed the dispensation of Byzantine and Islamic justice, and how ordinary Muslims, Christians, and Jews employed sophisticated legal strategies to navigate the evolving legal landscape of the Islamic Middle East, especially during the first two centuries after the Arab Muslim conquests in the 640s.
 
At Princeton, I will develop my monograph entitled "Recording Justice in Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt (550–800): Material Culture, Ordinary People, and the Making of the Islamic State." Drawing on papyrological, archeological, and numismatic evidence in Arabic, Greek, and Coptic, I intervene in existing scholarship by tracing the emergence of Islamic justice not from the perspective of scholarly elites and legal manuals, but from that of agriculturalists, illiterates, and the judicial documents that governed the rhythms of their ordinary lives. I argue that in the mid-sixth century, ordinary Egyptians found themselves ensnared in arbitration, facing significant barriers to accessing official courts and impartial justice. "Recording Justice" traces the gradual process by which the Islamic judiciary ascended to the top tier of the administration of justice, arguing that by the late eighth century, it effectively checked the powers of rural bishops, monks, and administrators, heralding the end of the “arbitration society.” The project draws on the earliest Arabic legal documents—promissory notes (adhkār ḥaqq), quittances (barāʾāt), and affidavits (iqrārāt)—known to us, showing that almost immediately after the Arab Muslim conquests, state officials began to issue legal documents to the populace, tying their property claims and legal relations to the sovereignty of the fledgling Islamic state.
 
My next book project, tentatively entitled "Materiality and Justice in the Global Middle Ages," tells the global history of how Eurasian and North African societies developed their documentary fetishism and reliance on the written word for adjudication and recording justice. The project dissects the complex relationship between formally appointed Muslim state officials, Christian monasteries, Arab tribes, and material culture, integrating hitherto neglected aspects of legal documents, such as their layout, visual and aesthetic arrangement, and materiality in the study of medieval justice and legality. Drawing on a largely neglected documentary cache in Arabic, Ottoman, and Greek at the Monastery of St. Catherine’s in Sinai, Egypt, I seek to understand how—like many medieval Christian monasteries—St. Catherine’s monks positioned themselves as dispensers of justice in the Sinai Peninsula, replicated Islamic positive law and official legal procedures, invested in their judicial reputation, and frequently corresponded with the highest Muslim jurisconsults (muftīs) in Cairo. Most monks were never formally vested by the state with judicial authority. I argue that to compensate for their lack of official clout and to give weight to the legal documents they issued, these monks ensured that anything they wrote adhered to the visual, scribal, and aesthetic expectations of official legal documents.

Apart from these book projects, I am engaged in several smaller research projects. In one article, I attempt to theorize historical and contemporary understandings of Islamic marriage, which has received growing attention in the context of divorce litigation in the US. In another project, I work on the edition and translation of a corpus of twelve Arabic responsa (fatwās) from the documentary cache at the Monastery of St. Catherine’s.
 
Before coming to Princeton, I served as a fellow at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School, a position I held during the final year of my dissertation. I earned my PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago (with Honors), a Master of Legal Studies at the University of Chicago Law School, an MA in Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut, and a BA in Islamic Studies at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. My research has been generously supported by grants from Yale Law School, the UChicago Humanities Division, the Mellon Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Medieval Academy of America, among others. I have published peer-reviewed articles in Islamic Law and Society, the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, and the Journal of Islamic Law.