Research
My research interests focus on the intersection of the history of religion, persecution, and genocide. I am dedicated to studying how religion and ideology have been used as tools of oppression for centuries, especially against ethnoreligious and racial minorities. More specifically, I am interested in the 2014 Yazidi Genocide and the history of anti-Yazidi sentiment in the Middle East, as well as in the Holocaust, the history of antisemitism, and Jewish history.
I began my scholarly career in high school, when I started working for the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco, California. From 2015 to 2019, I studied and researched the Holocaust and patterns of genocide, conducted oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors, and educated high school students about the Holocaust and the Yazidi Genocide. I also created a short documentary about the Armenian Genocide, specifically regarding the Young Turk regime’s process of Turkification.
I continued my scholarly endeavors during the summer of 2020, when I participated in the ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute for Curriculum Development in Critical Antisemitism Studies as a Wiesel-King Scholar. I learned about the history of antisemitism and its contemporary manifestations from leading antisemitism studies scholars, and I developed a program to combat antisemitism on my college campus.
In 2021, I interned with Yahad-In Unum, a Paris-based organization that has performed groundbreaking research on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and the Yazidi Genocide. During my time at Yahad, I researched and wrote about the impact of the Holocaust on Eastern European Jewish villages. I also wrote articles and raised awareness about the Yazidi Genocide, uncovered primary sources about the atrocity, and made four short educational documentaries about the subject.
In 2022, I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis at Carleton College about the 13th Handschar Division, a predominantly Bosnian Muslim unit of the Waffen-SS that was founded in 1943. Heinrich Himmler and other SS officials established the unit to replenish Germany's military strength with soldiers from non-German populations after a string of defeats. The unit was also co-founded by Haj Amin al-Husseini, a prominent Palestinian nationalist who saw the 13th Handschar as essential in his struggle against Zionist settlers and the British in Palestine. My thesis argued that the 13th Handschar Division was a site of ideological tension, with Nazi officials, al-Husseini, and the Handschar's Bosnian Muslim religious officers (referred to as "Imams") producing competing visions of how National Socialism and Islam should interact within the unit.
Following my graduation from Carleton, I founded the Yazidi Genocide Archive, a digital project that features primary sources about the 2014 genocide, oral histories from Yazidi survivors, and interviews with scholarly experts. The Yazidi Genocide Archive allows scholars, teachers, and the general public to learn more about the genocide and the Yazidi people, as well as to provide reliable sources that will help individuals in their research, educational work, and activism. Stay up to date on the Archive's blog for more updates!
In April 2026, I completed my master's thesis at Brandeis University, which is entitled "Establishing Accountability: Identifying the Key IS Leaders and Local Perpetrators Behind the Yazidi Genocide." My thesis investigates the following research questions: (1) Who were the Islamic State (IS) elites and lower-level perpetrators who made the Yazidi Genocide possible? (2) What roles did IS elites play in planning and perpetrating the genocide? (3) How did perpetrators on the ground implement or ignore their leaders’ commands? The thesis answers these questions by analyzing the key IS religio-political leaders who organized and justified the Yazidi Genocide, as well as how IS commanders and jihadists either implemented or disobeyed their superiors’ orders on the ground. The thesis defines “disobedience” not as a positive moral act, such as disobeying genocidal orders, but rather as the individual perpetration of worse atrocities beyond the intent of IS’s elite. My thesis seeks to provide a clearer picture of the religious, political, and social dynamics within and surrounding IS that led to the Yazidi Genocide.