Targeting audiences in African and Middle Eastern Studies, global slavery, critical race and gender studies, and histories of medicine and the body, my book project, She Who Knows: Sudanic Slavery, Race Formation, and Embodied Dissent in Ottoman Tunisia, 1735-1869 contends that the broad spectrum of dependency and servitude in the Ottoman Tunisia cannot be properly understood through the catch-all term “slavery.” Examining Sudanic slavery and trans-Saharan human trafficking, I argue that racial ideologies practiced by orthodox Muslim elites in both Ottoman Tunisia as well as western Africa (specifically the Sokoto Caliphate) played a significant role in shaping social hierarchies in the capital of Tunis by the early nineteenth century. While skin color was indeed a factor, religion also played a prominent role in conceptualizing the connection between race and free or enslaved status. 

In the midst of this weighted history and its fraught present-day legacies, enslaved Sudanic women in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ottoman Tunisia survived a changing world order through embodied practices of dissent. Enslaved and freed adepts practiced Bori-Stambeli, a collection of therapeutic practices drawing spiritual inspiration from both western and northern Africa, as one of many forms of refusal in the face of deadly racialized and patriarchal hierarchies crystallizing in western and northern Africa alike.

Alongside She Who Knows, I have ongoing writing focused on comparative environmental histories of North Africa and the Horn of Africa/Arabian Peninsula. I am a collaborator and researcher on The Mejba Census Database Project. I also write on alternative practices of love, gender, and sexuality, connective histories of Ottoman North Africa and Palestine, Kim Minhee, and Yasmine Hamdan.