scholarship
As a cultural historian of the Arabic-speaking world, I ask how kitchens and culinary practices can help us understand histories of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. My primary sources include oral histories of home cooks, out-of-print cookbooks, cultural material like novels and films, and archival material ranging from probate records to personal letters.
My work lies at the intersection of cultural history and gender studies. I look at food and kitchens as avenues leading into under-explored corners of history & society, from the materiality of modernity to the affective force of national belonging. ORCID | Google Scholar
books
Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato. Forthcoming from the University of California Press, October 2025
Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean. Co-editor and contributor. Edited with Graham Auman Pitts and Vicki Valosik, University of Texas Press, 2021. (Now in paperback!)
journal articles, book chapters, essays
Revolutionary Landscapes and Kitchens of Refusal: Tomato Sauce and Sovereignty in Egypt. Gender & History 34, no. 3 (2022), 789-809.
Teaching Happiness: Women’s Education and Transnational Currents in Modern Morocco. Journal of Women’s History 34, no. 3 (2022), 59-81.
From Kitchen Arabic to Recipes for Good Taste: Nation, Empire, and Race in Egyptian Cookbooks, Global Food History 8, no. 1 (2022). Awarded Global Food History Prize for an Emerging Food Historian; commended by the Sophie Coe Prize committee.
Transnational Dimensions of Moroccan Gender History: Sources, Access, Politics, essay for the roundtable “Gendered Transnationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17, no. 3.
‘Kitchen Histories’ and the Taste of Mobility in Morocco, Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 6, no. 2 (2019).
Food, Happiness, and the Egyptian Kitchen (1900-1952), in Insatiable Appetite: Food as a Cultural Signifier, ed. Julia Hauser et al., Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Fenugreek: Seed of a Forgotten History of North Africa, Proceedings of the 2018 Oxford Food Symposium, ed. Mark McWilliams, London: Prospect Books, 2019.
Shahrazad’s Pharmacy: Women’s Bodies of Knowledge in the Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies, Middle Eastern Literatures 19 (2016): 185-205.
Fava Beans and Béchamel: Translating Egyptian Food as Modern Cuisine, Proceedings of the 2015 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, ed. Mark McWilliams, London: Prospect Books, 2015.
book reviews, review essays, &tc.
Food Studies in the Arab World: An Interview, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 44 (2024), 145-67.
Review of Food and Families in the Making: Knowledge Reproduction & Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco, by Katharina Graf. Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 25, no. 2 (2025), 70–71.
Bread and the Art of Being Governed,” review of States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan, by José Ciro Martínez. Current History 121, no. 839, (2022), 366-68.
Recipes for a Field: Translating Middle Eastern Cookbooks and the Horizons of Food Studies, review essay in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 19 (2019): 87-95.
Review of Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel, by Nir Avieli, in The Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 2018.