My research focuses on global migration, borders, race and ethnicity, identity and inequality, and the politics of memory. I am broadly interested in how multicultural societies grapple with diversity and difference and in questions concerning the boundaries of political communities.

Photo: An Islamic funeral in Berlin

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My first book manuscript, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (under review), is an ethnographic study of how minoritized communities navigate end-of-life decisions in countries where they face structural barriers to political inclusion. Building on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul, it demonstrates how the seemingly quotidian practices surrounding the death, burial, and repatriation of racial and religious minorities are structured by deeper political questions about the meaning of citizenship and belonging in an increasingly transnational world.
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I am currently at work on a second book project which explores how countries commemorate and come to terms with acts of political violence and state terrorism. Drawing on cases such as the exhumation of Francisco Franco in Spain, the Boston Marathon Bombing, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, a failed military coup in Turkey, and ongoing struggles over the place of colonial and confederate monuments in Europe and the United States, it investigates how public rituals of grief and mourning help shape collective memory and identity.  

My research has been funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Please see my publications page for links to my writing. 
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Photo: Protestors demonstrating against the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston