My dissertation, “The Information Gatherers: The Birth of Modern British Intelligence and Information Strategies, 1873-1914”, explores the relationship between British intelligence collection apparatuses and private banks, the press, and public opinion across Europe and the British Empire. In particular, it examines the ways in which the British Intelligence Branch—an MI6 precursor created in 1873 in order to collect, collate, and disseminate global intelligence to British policymakers—designed techniques and systems intended to gather and channel information within the context of late nineteenth-century European interstate competition, while highlighting its foundational relationship to private British banks. Throughout my dissertation, I trace three parallel but deeply interwoven histories—sovereign debt issuance, institutional intelligence collection, and colonial knowledge production—between 1873 and 1914.
My recent article “The Cave Mission of 1876 and Britain’s Imperial Information Strategies” (Past & Present, 2023) investigates the ways in which British officials gathered information concerning Egypt through sovereign debt restructuring and financial oversight regimes, and analyzes these methods in light of the coterminous creation of British intelligence organizations.
Committee Members:
Alex Chase-Levenson, Marc Flandreau, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Awards:
Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship (2021-2022)
University of Pennsylvania Dean's Scholar (2021)
Academic Year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, Arabic (2019-2020)
Haldane Research Grant (2019)
O. Odlozilik Fellow (2018-2019)
Georgian Papers Programme Fellow at Royal Archives, Windsor Castle (2018)
Annenberg History Fellow (2017-2018)
MSc., Political Theory (with distinction), London School of Economics (2016)
B.A., English (with honors), University of Chicago (2011)
British Empire, Middle East, 19th-Century Global Finance, Egypt, Sovereign Debt, 19th-Century Information Technologies
Fields: Modern Middle East; British Empire; 19th-Century Finance
HIST 081: The History of the Middle East Since 1800 (Fall 2018)
HIST 001: The Making of the Modern World (Spring 2019)
"The Cave Mission of 1876 and Britain’s Imperial Information Strategies," Past & Present (Spring 2023)
"A Royal Purchase: The First Jane Austen Novel Sold," Notes and Queries (June 2019)
Non-Academic Writing:
"Anatomy of An Exodus," New Lines Magazine (Sept 2022)
"The Philosopher's Wine," New Lines Magazine (May 2021)
Media:
The Lede Podcast (New Lines Magazine): "Telling A Syrian Fighter's Story" (w/Idrees Ahmad and Faisal Al-Yafai)
Discovered earliest known purchase record of a Jane Austen novel while researching in Windsor Castle archives. Story covered in New York Times, Guardian, Smithsonian.