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About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of History at National University of Singapore. Currently, I am preparing my book manuscript on mobile Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean which is based on my doctoral dissertation which won a Book Prize from the Al-Wehdah Arab Association of Singapore in 2015. The book, tentatively titled Fluid Jurisdictions, explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia.

I have been invited to give talks on my research at New York University, Cornell University, University of Toronto and Harvard University. In May 2017, I was invited to give a keynote talk at the workshop on “Rule, Resistance and the State/s: Perspectives from Islamic International Law and International Relations,” held at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, Finland.

After receiving my PhD in History from Princeton University in 2012, I held the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis till 2015. I was a Research Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in 2015-2016.

Recent Publications

Peer-reviewed publications in journals

“The Question of Animal Slaughter in the British Straits Settlements during the Early Twentieth Century” Indonesia and the Malay World 43.126 (July 2015): 173-190; Winner of the Indonesia and the Malay World Young Scholar Prize.

“Craving Bureaucracy: Marriage, Islamic Law, and Arab Petitioners in the Straits Settlements,” Muslim World, 105.4 (October 2015): 496-515.

“Legal Pluralism and the East India Company in the Straits of Malacca, 1786-1821,” Law and History Review, 33.4 (November 2015): 945-964.

“Class, White Women and Elite Asian Men in British Courts during the Late Nineteenth Century” Journal of Women’s History, 31.1 (Fall 2018).

Other peer-reviewed publications

“Concept of Jurisdiction under Colonial Rule,” The Oxford Handbook of Jurisdiction in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, forthcoming).   

“British Colonial Law and the Establishment of Waqfs by Arabs in the Straits Settlements, 1860-1941” in The Worlds of the Trust Lionel Smith, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 167-202.

“Tea and Company: Interactions between the Arab Elite and the British in Cosmopolitan Singapore” in Hadhrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Identity Maintenance or Assimilation? Ahmad Ibrahim Abushouk and Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2009, pp. 57-80.

 

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Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Yemen, Britain, Netherlands, Indian Ocean

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Asia, British Isles, Netherlands, Southeast Asia, United Kingdom

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Early Modern, Modern, 20th century

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Colonialism, Diplomacy, Economic History, Gender, Law, Migration & Immigration, Politics, World War I