Photographer George Azar and a militia fighter in Zaitouna Bay, Beirut, 1982. Photo by Michael Nelson
I am a political anthropologist, a feminist writer, and currently a Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. I work in Lebanon and Sudan, where I examine why people migrate, and how migration mobilizes people under conditions of political violence and racial capitalism. My book based on this research, titled Mobilized: Labor and Political Mobilization Between Sudan and Lebanon, is forthcoming with Hau Books (University of Chicago Press)
I am currently also working on a major project about militia governance of civilian relations and intimacy during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). You can read my most recent publications on this and other topics below.
“What’s Sex Got To Do With It? Traffic and Protection in Lebanon’s Civil War”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, fall issue 2025
“The gun has become a type of thinking: A conversation about war with the Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin”, Public Seminar, June 2024
“Life is a Gamble: Labors of Mobility, Risk and Return Between Sudan and Lebanon”, Cultural Anthropology, February 2023
Special issue: Bordering and the War on Migration, American Ethnologist Online, September 2025
Recent publications
“Mama’s Maybe? Hierarchies of Migrant Kin-Making from Lebanon to Sudan”, Signs Journal vol 51, no.2, winter 2026
“A Revolution in Pain: A conversation with members of Sudan’s resistance committees and Magdi elGizouli”, Africa is a Country, September 2023
“Sudanese Migrants’ Labor in Times of Economic Crisis and Revolution”, merip, August 2022