About

I am a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. In recent years I specialize in the history and current politics of the climate crisis in the Middle East and the Global South. I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of numerous articles and three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006).

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Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, I was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer at the history department at Princeton University. In 2009, I received a joint Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University. I also hold an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Joint LL.B. and B.A. in Law and Arabic Language & Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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I am a co-founder of the Laboratory for the History of the Climate Crisis at Tel Aviv University, a research and teaching platform for generating a “usable past” for humanity’s greatest challenge in the twenty-first century. I also co-founded the Social History Workshop, a weekly blog published on the Haaretz website analyzing current Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of contemporary historical research.