Research
Born in Bermuda and raised in South Florida, I’ve lived in Cairo, New Haven, Doha, Los Angeles, New York, Amman, and Atlanta. I bring this diverse background to intensely interdisciplinary, intersectional, and global analyses that illuminate the complex constructions of race and identity.
Although trained as a historian, my work spans American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer Theory, Performance Studies, and Middle East Studies. Emphasizing and interrogating points of contact between disciplines, I “queer” categories to destabilize assumptions about nation, state, religion, citizenship, class, color, and ideology. Most importantly, I center MENA peoples and their diasporas within a global racial field, as well as shared processes of genocide, displacement, erasure and governance.
This article explores activist Aliya Hassen’s life to identify local, regional, national, and international networks cultivated by MENA Muslims in the United States. The United States was a hub of mid-twentieth-century transnational Arab and Muslim organizing, where many activists promoted an ecumenical understanding of Islam that tackled pressing American concerns like feminism, anti-imperialism, as well as social and racial justice. Because this organizing engaged both Arab and non-Arab American groups, including the Federation of Islamic Associations, Islamic Center of DC, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the Nation of Islam, Muslim Mosque, Inc., Ahmadiyya missionaries, and the Muslim World League, it challenges the salience of American racial formations and national frames as meaningful analytical categories. Spanning the historic marginalization of MENA peoples and post-World War II consolidation of Islamophobia in the United States, Hassen's biography demonstrates the ways historical forces surface different ways of "reading" and understanding her life.
Ambigua Gens: Unseeing and Unmaking the Middle East
My dissertation and first book project tracks the lives of several figures whose experiences shed light on the complex ways Middle Eastern identities have been lived, imagined, and negotiated across the long twentieth century. At first glance, the “unusual figures” I analyze come from very different backgrounds: Calouste Gulbenkian was an Ottoman Armenian oil financier who lived most of his life in Europe; Aliya Hassen was a mid-century Muslim American activist from the Midwest; Palestinian American Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century; and Lebanese Colombian Shakira Mebarak is a global pop music phenomenon. However, drawing on personal papers, multinational corporate archives, popular culture and government documents, I show how these four lives, both singly and together, outline the global racial projects that construct “the Middle East” and its peoples in complex and often deeply problematic ways. Particularly attuned to the tension between how these figures are seen relative to how they see themselves, I show how MENA networks and identities have endured across the twentieth century, even when they have frequently been erased, marginalized and attacked.
Rich Muslim, Bad Muslim: The Political Economy of Islamophobia." with Dr. Zaynab Quadri
In this essay, we theorize Islamophobia not as a cogent racism in its own right, but as one civilizational discourse among many that legitimizes the violent disciplining of those who threaten the interests of capitalist imperialism. Specifically, we show that a focus on political economy yields a view of Islamophobia riddled with messy moments of "exception"-- such as when European and American oil companies incorporated Muslims within their profit-seeking ventures, when the U.S. government recruited Islamic allies as bulwarks against Soviet communism, and when lucrative security partnerships in the so-called "War on Terror" drew some in the Islamic world closer to the U.S. while others were subject to violent military action. We argue that together these moments demonstrate deep continuities through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that hold despite the rupture of 9/11: though Islamophobia became more overtly racialized, Muslims were still eligible for inclusion if their political willingness and access to capital could be deployed in the service of U.S. national security. Islamophobia in the twenty-first century could, in other words, function as a rationalizing heuristic for global U.S. hegemony.
In response to a question posed by David Kazanjian and Anahid Kassabian: "Why is there no Armenian postcolonialism?" Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began research that would become "1994: Will Postcolonialism Travel." This article is at the center of the 2008 edited volume Other Asias, which proposes an epistemic reimagining of continentality, race, religion, nationalism, diaspora and empire. Nearly twenty years later, however, Armenians remained especially fraught subjects in the 2020 California Ethnic Studies Model curriculum. Sketching a personal account of curricular debates alongside Spivak's call to theorize "Other Asias," this essay asks, Why is there no Armenian in Ethnic Studies?
The AGBU in the World
This book offers a global history of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, from its founding in Cairo in 1906 as a secular, transnational philanthropic institution dedicated to the intellectual, moral, and economic advancement of Armenians, to its emergence as one of the most globalized and enduring organizations in the Armenian world. While grounded in this longer institutional history, the study focuses on the last forty years - a period marked by genocide’s long aftermath, the re-establishment of Armenian statehood, shifting diasporic geographies, and the profound transformations of globalization, nonprofit professionalization, and the digital revolution. Drawing on archival research, oral history, and "multi-sited historical ethnography," it argues that the AGBU provides a uniquely revealing lens into how Armenian collective life has been sustained and reshaped across these decades. Rather than simply an institutional chronicle, the book argues that as the organization has continually navigated core tensions - between diaspora and homeland, preservation and reinvention, elite leadership and broader participation, and crisis response versus long-term strategy - it has maintained continuity through its founding commitments. In doing so, it demonstrates how the AGBU has not only reflected but actively structured the evolving meanings, interconnectedness, and global possibilities of Armenianness in the modern era.
Memoir
Another project spun off from a dissertation chapter is a deeply historicized memoir of my family’s intentionally murky migrations from Diyarbakir and Aleppo to the Americas. Following my namesake Tovmas Simsarian’s escape from the Ottoman Empire through smuggling rings in Eastern Anatolia to Armenian receiving colonies in the Middle East, Jersey City, Harlem and Fresno, I use family history to explore the widespread dissemination of US racial theories beginning in the late nineteenth century, alongside equally widespread silences and misrecognitions of MENA diaspora. Flashing forward to my present as queer Floridian born in Bermuda, who saw himself in Shakira, I follow the echoes of these misreadings and erasures through entertainment and academic spaces, where my identities have been similarly uplifted and silenced in radically different ways. Linking the backdrop of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire with a present fraught terrorist watchlists, NSEERS and Muslims bans enacted after 9/11, this multinational project is as much about my coming-of-age in an era of neoliberalism as it is the salience of racialized social engineering in modern governance.