About
I am currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College where I chair the Anthropology department and coordinate the Middle East Studies program. I am an interdisciplinary scholar and filmmaker, and am interested in the relationship between infrastructures and systems that connect and disconnect people and things. My writing and films are about how daily practices around these systems shape ideas about collectivity and collaboration, belonging and exclusion. I live in Los Angeles.
My first book, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016), is about how fragmented infrastructures in Lebanon — things like private electricity generator subscription systems and social welfare managed by religious-affiliated institutions— help to produce and recalibrate notions of sectarian belonging and exclusion.
My current research focuses on what I am calling “post-grid imaginaries,” and the emergence of home backup battery systems and microgrids in the context of the transition to renewable energy in California.
My films have screened in various contexts including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017. My feature length experimental documentary filmed in Lebanon, The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud, was completed with a Wenner-Gren Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film. My short experimental film, Gigi (from 9-5) from 2001, is part of filmmaker Miranda July’s feminist film collection Joanie4Jackie, and is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
I am a co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology. I am also a co-section editor (politics) at Public Books, where I most recently commissioned a series of essays for the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. At Pomona College, I have taught classes on ethnographic methods, environmental anthropology, visual anthropology and cooperative filmmaking with local community organization Gente Organizada. I am also on the steering committee of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations Grant (Kara Wittman, PI), with the Center for Speaking, Writing and the Image at Pomona College. I will be working to expand opportunities for students to work with images and video as part of an expansive liberal arts education.