I am Assistant Professor in Ottoman Studies at Utrecht University. I am a historian of the pre-modern Middle East specializing in the early modern (14th - 18th centuries) socio-political history of the Arab world. My research interests include the comparative study of pre-modern state institutions and political elites in the Middle East as well as the history of Arabia in its regional context. I am a member of the Research Group Islam and Arabic and of the Balzan Seminar for the Study of the Formation, Maintenance, and Failure of States in Muslim Societies (2020–present). As part of my activities in the Balzan Seminar and with funding from NIAS and the Lorentz Center, I co-organized the international workshop Biographies of Rulers in the Premodern Islamicate World (29 July - August 2, 2024).

My current research project, "Early Modern State Development in Yemen" is funded by Horizon-2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions program and hosted at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University. It questions how the state and political elites developed in Yemen in the 13th-17th centuries, and what role the first period of Ottoman rule (1538-1635) played in the transformation of regional political and social structures. As part of this project, I organized the online exhibition Yemen through the Dutch Lens and host the Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture series.

Before coming to Utrecht, I was a fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (2021-2022). I received my PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and her BA and MA at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University. 

Key Publications:

“The Lords of Kawkaban and the Transformation of the State in Early Modern Yemen (15th–17th Centuries)”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 66 (2023): 289–317. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341596

“Sayyids, Tribal Kinship, and the Imamate in Zaydi Yemen under Imam Ya?ya Sharaf al-Din (d. 965/1558)”, Medieval Encounters, 29 (2023): 442-463. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340173