A dual Canadian-American citizen, I earned two BA's from the University of Washington (Seattle) in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and in International Studies: Comparative Religion (with a minor in Anthropology). I spent a full year during my undergraduate degree studying Arabic in Cairo, Egypt, through the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo. After graduation, I returned to Cairo as a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellow for another year of Arabic. An interest in religion and conflict took me to the University of Ulster for an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies.
I began to study Islamic Law during my doctoral program in Religion at Emory University. During the course of my graduate training and fieldwork, I spent one more semester in Cairo as a Center for Arabic Study Abroad II fellow, but my primary research site shifted to Morocco, where I spend two and a half years supported by fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, and the Social Science Research Council. I have returned to the region periodically since then, most recently as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 2017.
My research focuses on Islamic legal history in medieval and early modern North Africa (the Maghrib) and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) as well as colonial Mauritania.
My first monograph, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Iberia, was published in November 2021 by the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and distributed by Harvard University Press. Leaving Iberia is the winner of the Canadian Law and Society Association's W. Wesley Pue Prize and the Canadian Association of Hispanists' 2022 Best Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Association's 2022 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize.
Prerequisite: *3 in HIST at the 300-level or consent of Department.
The style, structure, and doctrine of the Qur'an in the light of the Western critical evaluation of the text.
Prerequisite: one course in Islam or consent of Program Coordinator.
An in-depth study of the problems of Islamic Studies.