Welcome.

I am a sociologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University. For 2024-2025, I am an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Previously, I was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2020.

My research brings together economic sociology, migration studies, and cultural sociology, drawing primarily on ethnographic and experimental methods.

My dissertation, “Brokers of Order: How Money Moves in Wartime Syria,” received the 2021 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association and the 2021 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences from the Middle East Studies Association. An ongoing book project based on this research examines how economic networks emerge and expand during episodes of profound crisis, and the broader effects of these economic activities on social and political order. Specifically, I study hawala, a peer-to-peer money transfer system that has become a reliable economic institution in the midst of Syria’s protracted civil war and refugee crisis. I find that hawala has not only survived the strains of conflict but has also provided a rare source of order and stability in the daily lives of those who have endured the hardships of war and exile.

This research is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and Turkey, where close to eighty percent of Syrian refugees reside today. I also conducted more than one hundred interviews with brokers and customers (refugees and NGOs), implemented an experimental audit study of brokers who advertise their services online, and collected multiple forms of original quantitative data (transaction logs, daily black market exchange rates). My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and Princeton’s Center for the Study of Social Organization.

In other ongoing projects, I examine the relational underpinnings of discretion using the original field experiment from my dissertation research; investigate whether states’ status competitions influence market evaluations of their creditworthiness using statistical analyses of sovereign rating upgrades; and consider how transnational networks of expertise shape economic governance in the Global South drawing on interviews and qualitative case studies.

I hold an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University and a BA in Political Science from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey).