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. More specifically, I am interested in Jewish history, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, as well as anti-Yazidi sentiment in Iraq and the 2014 Yazidi Genocide.

 

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 2020, 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.

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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.

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Now, I am the founder of 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!