About

I am a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Washington, where I also earned an MA in Sociology in 2021, a BA with Honors in 2018, and a special concentration in Social Statistics at the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. My work spans social movement theory and collective action, the sociology of religion, identity, environmental sociology, and the comparative study of nationalism.

My dissertation, Sacred Bonds: Ritual, Identity, and Nationhood, asks a question that religion and nationalism scholarship has largely left open: when does shared religious practice bind dominant and subordinate ethnic groups into a common national identity, and when does it harden the boundary between them? Through a comparative study of Iran and Turkey, I develop an interactional theory of belonging, which locates the answer in the intensity of collective ritual rather than in doctrine or shared confession alone. The committee was chaired by Kyle Crowder, with Steven Pfaff, Edgar Kiser, Scott Radnitz, and Aria Fani.

The first article from this project, “Making and Transcending Boundaries: The Effect of Ritual on Nationalism,” appeared in Theory and Society in 2024. Two further papers are under review: one on ritual intensity and national belonging across multiethnic states, and a second, with Steven Pfaff, on popular religiosity and the rise and fall of Belgian nationalism. Work in progress extends the argument to the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in Iran, to the mobilization of water protesters and the role of ethnic positionality in environmental grievance, and to the fragility of national belonging in Turkey.

I work in mixed methods, combining interviews with archival and newspaper research, comparative-historical analysis, text-as-data approaches, and statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys. I work in Azerbaijani, Turkish, Persian, and English, which allows me to read primary sources and conduct interviews directly across the cases I compare.

I have taught as instructor of record since 2021. At the University of Washington my courses have included criminology; drugs, law, and society; social stratification; sociological theory; contemporary social movements; and a civic internship seminar. I taught classical sociological theory at Hofstra University and global social movements at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I currently teach introduction to sociology at Everett Community College and Cascadia College. I have also served as a teaching assistant for statistical concepts and methods for the social sciences, foundations of social inquiry, and the sociology of religion.

Outside the university I write and speak publicly on identity, protest, ethnic inequality, and human rights, with commentary and interviews for the BBC, Voice of America, and the Kyiv Post, and invited talks at the University of Toronto, the Economic Forum in Karpacz, and Gelişim University in Istanbul. I am also a translator: with Türkan Urmulu I translated Samed Behrengi’s literary works into Turkish across twelve volumes, along with books by Mehmet Emin Resulzade and Bijen Cezani.