Teaching is one of the most rewarding parts of my work…

I approach it as a shared process of discovery—helping students engage the past through close reading, discussion, and creative interpretation. Whether we’re examining a medieval chronicle, a fragment of colored glass, or a map of trade routes, I want students to see history not as a fixed story but as a living practice of inquiry, shaped by evidence, imagination, and debate.

I have taught at Bard College Berlin, where I offered the course “Making Value and Using Resources,” exploring how societies have defined and transformed value through natural resources, technologies, labor, and systems of exchange. Before moving to Berlin, I taught “Survey of Arab History” at the American University in Cairo, an undergraduate introduction to the history of the Arab world. I also served as a teaching assistant for numerous courses on Arab and Islamic history and assisted in classes on political thought, trade, and empire. Previously, I co-taught the Spring School “Environmental Methods in Mamluk and Islamic Studies” at the University of Bonn, which brought together early-career researchers from multiple disciplines to experiment with new ways of integrating textual, archaeological, and environmental evidence.

Across these settings, I have worked with students from a wide range of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. I strive to create classrooms that are open, collaborative, and attentive to the diversity of perspectives that make historical study so vital. My teaching often begins with a primary source, object, image, or material trace and builds outward—linking evidence to larger historical questions and inviting students to think critically about how knowledge itself is made.

Mentorship is an extension of this approach. I aim to help students develop their own questions, pursue independent research, and build confidence in their intellectual voice. More broadly, I want students to leave my courses not simply with greater knowledge of a particular historical period, but with a stronger sense of how historical arguments are made: how evidence is selected and interpreted, how competing explanations are weighed, and how our understanding of the past changes as we ask new questions of it.