Experience Highlights

Publications

• Millennial Gulf Blog (Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington)
  • “Home of Khaleeji Hip Hop and R&B: Bahrain in the Gulf Music Scene.” 5 Dec. 2022.
  • “Sandstorm Comics: Building a Local Comic Book Industry.” 14 Nov. 2022.
  • “Constructing Mars in Kuwait: Young Kuwaitis Lead on Space Sector Development.” 24 Oct. 2022.
  • “Probing Social Pressures with Textiles and Ice Cream.” 11 Oct. 2022.
  • “Qatar’s World Cup and Public Art: Expanding the Field of Dialogue.” 26 Sept. 2022.
  • “The Knot: Putting Young Emiratis at the Forefront of Memory Preservation and Storytelling.” 18 Jul. 2022.
  • “Oman Debuts at the 59th Venice Biennale with ‘Destined Imaginaries.” 27 Jun. 2022.
  • “Padel Picks Up: The World’s Fastest Growing Sport Finds a Home in the Gulf.” 31 May 2022.
  • “Creating Space and Access: Literary Communities and Collectives in the UAE.” 18 Apr. 2022.
  • “Asim Abdulaziz: Pushing Boundaries Through Experimental Film in Yemen.” 21 Mar. 2022.
  • “Abdulla BinHindi: The Rise of NFT Art in the Gulf.” 31 Jan. 2022.
  • “Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale: A New Platform for Saudi Artists on the World Stage.” 9 Dec. 2021.
  • “Zayed University Adopts Experimental Approach, Prompting Skepticism and Support.” 8 Nov. 2021.
  • “IN NARRATIVE: Exploring Urban Gulf Spaces Through Fiction.” 12 Oct. 2021.
  • “Expo 2020 Dubai: By and For UAE Youth.” 27 Sept. 2021.
• Fiker Institute, Dubai
  • “Creating Spaces for West African Art in the UAE: Exhibitions, Institutions, and Individuals.” Feb. 2022.
• Global Art Daily E-Magazine
  • “Salwa Mikdadi Reflects on the Opening of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arab Center for the Study of Art.” 1 Oct. 2021.
  • “Sharjah Art Foundation Jets Ahead on the Flying Saucer.” 9 Dec. 2020.
• Infrastructures of the Self in Late Ottoman Iraq
  • Assisted Camille Cole, Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, with data organizing and mapping in her short article entitled, “Infrastructures of the Self in Late Ottoman Iraq” in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.05.2021, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/28757.
• OpenGulf Blog Post
  • “Wādi Tāyīn: Then and Now.” OpenGulf: Blogs, 23 July 2020.
• Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2019: Undergraduate Research Workshop Abstract and Poster
  • “Artistic Taste-Making at the Sharjah Biennial.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 21 Oct. 2020, pp. 125–126., doi:10.1017/rms.2020.8.

Presentations & Interviews

• Building Digital Humanities Symposium 2022
  Presentation on career pathways in the Digital Humanities, alongside Dr. David Wrisley, for the Imagining Digital Humanities Friendly Careers panel session on November 11, 2022.
• Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
  Contributed to presentation entitled “Beyond the National Archive: Digital Futures for Gulf Studies” given by Dr. Nora Barakat and Dr. David Wrisley on October 18, 2022.
• Right-to-Left Conference at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute
  Presentation entitled Shaping Old Sharjah: A Geospatial Analysis of Biennial Art Exhibitions in Old Sharjah from 2003–2019 at the Right-to-Left conference on June 8, 2021. Participated in the Right-to-Left and Forms of Distance panel session with 3 other scholars.
• OpenGulf Summer 2021 Research Term
  Workshop entitled OpenGulf Summer 2021: Using Google Sheets Tutorial to help researchers and students new to the Digital Humanities with using Google Sheets as a data analysis tool.
• OpenGulf Historical Texts Analysis Gulf-a-thon
  Tutorial created for researchers learning to use the GeoNames database for geospatial research, created for OpenGulf’s March 8, 2021 virtual Gulf-a-thon event (view shorter tutorial here).
• NYUAD Winter Institute in Digital Humanities at NYC Digital Humanities Week Workshop
  Workshop entitled Using Google Sheets to Create, Organize, and Explore Your Humanities Data (available for download on Zenodo) geared towards Humanities practitioners aiming to employ digital tools in their research; given on February 11, 2021.
• Middle East Librarians Association Annual Conference 2020 Presentation
  Presentation entitled Team-Based Manipulation of Digitally Available Texts in a Remote Environment: Notes on Research and Pedagogy on Social Justice/Decolonizing the Library panel (with Dr. David Wrisley, Dr. Nora Barakat, and Gurgen Tadevosyan) on October 21, 2020.
• Data and Human Space Expert Chat with Dr. David Wrisley & Nada Ammagui
  Interview for NYU Abu Dhabi core course, Data and Human Space, taught by Professor David Wrisley, Fall 2020.

Experience Highlights

• Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (USA)
  Research Associate (Politics, Society & Culture)
  • Writing blogs focusing on youth-driven initiatives and trends
• Arts & Humanities Postgraduate Research Fellow at NYUAD
  • Conducted geospatial research on the Sharjah Biennial using ArcGIS and QGIS
  • Collected artwork data from previous SB iterations
  • Gave workshops geared towards Humanities practitioners on using Google Sheets to organize, manipulate, and visualize data
• HarvardX: October 2020
  • Completed verified track of GSD1x The Architectural Imagination online course
• HarvardX: August 2020
  • Completed verified track of DH101 Introduction to Digital Humanities online course
• OpenGulf Research Project: May–July 2020
  Postgraduate Research Assistant
  • Worked with team of 6 remote researchers to conduct digital analyses of historical corpora on Gulf geographies
  • Corrected OCR on 19^th century French gazetteer and transcribed 18^th century English letters on From the Page
  • Annotated 1,000+ toponyms in 20^th century British gazetteer of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf using Recogito
• Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism: May–July 2019
  Education and Outreach Intern
  • Researched and developed Visual Thinking Strategies manual for “Popular Culture and the City” exhibition (featuring art by Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Taysir Batniji) for docents
  • Brainstormed educational guide ideas for visitors to Najat Makki exhibition at the Cultural Foundation
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: September–December 2018
  Islamic Art Department Intern                                                                              
  • Researched and digitized 900+ of Sir K.A.C Creswell’s Islamic architectural photographs using cataloguing software
  • Assisted department director with translating 600+ numismatic objects from Arabic to English
  • Learned about different museum departments with staff from Design, Archives, Registrar, and Conservation

Books I’ve been reading

• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
• 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
• Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon