Research: (specific to Middle East) women’s mobility; women’s Islamic education; gender, (specific to urban spaces): graffiti, graffiti writing in New York City, urban New Jersey and Philadelphia
General Interests: notions of slow work; apprenticeship as education; oral history; storytelling; labor migration
B.A., San Jose State University; M.A., Stanford University; Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University; Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Middle East & North African Studies & Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, 2013-2015.
Academic Publications:
Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran, Indiana University Press (forthcoming September 2024)
The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch, in The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty (November 2023)
Reading as Practice: The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran and Clair de Lune, Anthropology and Education Quarterly (March 2019)
Towards the Ideal Revolutionary Shi'i Woman: The Howzevi (Seminarian), the Requisites of Marriage and Islamic Education in Iran, Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 13(2015)
The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran: Constituting and Reconstituting Paths. Dissertation Abstract, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11(2). July 2015.
Web-based Publications:
Contextualizing Exclusion: Lessons from Kambis, Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art, World. September 16, 2015.
Buses in South and North Tehran: Education and Schooling, Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art, World. August 12, 2015.
Measuring Up: Where Has the ‘I’ Gone in My Writing?, Anthropology News. October 2014.
Islamic Education and the Howzevi (Seminarian) Women of Pirouzi-Tehran, Anthropology News. June 2013.
On the Edge of Protest in Tehran: Discontinuing, Shifting Boundaries, Anthropology News. January 2013.
Down on Vali Asr: Encounters with Tehran's Street Children, PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau. May 2012.
Fellow, Women Creating Change, Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University
Workshop Leader, the Middle East Institute, Columbia University