Overview
I grew up speaking Arabic as an expat in the UAE and Egypt, and kept up my language learning through high school and college. After studying political science at Columbia University, I made a shift and earned a masters in the department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES) at Washington University in St. Louis. There, my focus was on the cognitive science of religion and stories of sexuality as the basis of legal theory. I then studied for a year at the University of Chicago, where I started a project of translating of the medieval Arabic translation of Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos.