My dissertation research is concerned with how occupied societies understand and perform their resistance to occupation. I focus on the collaborator as a liminal figure – the friend who became a foe – to examine the relationship between methods of counterinsurgency exercised by an occupying military and practices of resistance employed by armed rebel groups. My research therefore offers a unique way to study the politics and sociology of occupied societies.

In a co-authored project, I look to understand how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence targeting systems, challenge political and normative orders. We focus on: the processes through which technologies alter the moral experience of groups and individuals; on how political entities and societies come to delegate increased destructive power to “thinking machines”; and on what international orders and norms are jeopardized by the advent of militarized AI.

I am also invested in deepening my understanding in qualitative and interpretive methods, with emphasis on how histories, and historical documents, ought to be used in contemporary research. I have formed and led a reading group on the philosophy of history at the University of Minnesota’s Political Science Department and want to develop a project based on my experiences in the colonial archives in Great Britain, France and Israel.