My research asks how states learn to see the world they seek to govern. Situated at the intersection of modern Middle Eastern and global history, my scholarship examines the relationship between knowledge and power through maps, roads, reports, borders, and classifications. Drawing on multilingual archival research and the methodological traditions of area studies, I investigate how imperial transformations and state-building projects reshaped territories, populations, and political belonging. Combining historical geography with global and transnational approaches, my work explores how competing imperial ambitions, local political claims, and alternative visions of sovereignty shaped the making and unmaking of political orders.

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Across two interconnected book projects, I trace the transformation of imperial modes of governance into centralized nation-state rule and its intersections with the emergence of the United States as a world-making power. My first book, Roads to Dersim: Kurds, Empire, Race, and the State, reconstructs the transformation of an Ottoman frontier into Turkish national territory, examining how infrastructure, racialized discourses, and state violence contributed to the consolidation of sovereignty and the production of statelessness. My second project, Mapping Empire: The United States and the Post-Ottoman Middle East, shifts the vantage point from eastern Anatolia to Washington, exploring how American scholars and policymakers sought to reorder the ruins of empires into a new international order. Together, these projects place the modern Middle East at the center of global histories of empire, state formation, and sovereignty, revealing how the region and its peoples both shaped and were shaped by competing visions of the modern world.