I am currently Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). I specialize in the history of U.S. foreign relations, with particular attention to the 20th century. My research focuses on U.S. relations with the Islamic world, U.S. relations with Iran, Muslim women’s human rights, transnational history, and human rights and U.S. foreign policy. My first book, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) explores the integration of American concerns for women’s human rights into U.S. policy towards the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. My other publications include book chapters and journal articles on President Harry Truman and the Middle East, the international movement to end female genital mutilation (FGM), U.S. encounters with Saudi gender relations during the first Gulf War, U.S. relations with Iran, and state of the field essays. I have also authored essays for Passport and Town Square 49, as well as several book reviews.
I was an inaugural faculty fellow with FAU’s Peace, Justice, and Human Rights (PJHR) Initiative, and I am currently affiliated with PJHR and FAU’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program. I am the recipient of several grants and honors, including a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend, the Samuel Flagg Bemis Research Grant from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the SHAFR Summer Institute, and the Marvin Wachman Fellowship in Force and Diplomacy from the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD) at Temple University. I am an active member of SHAFR, as well as several other scholarly organizations.
I am also the winner of the 2019 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The Bernath Lecture Prize recognizes and encourages excellence in research and teaching by a younger historian (under age 41 or within 10 years of earning the Ph.D.), and prior winners have gone on to become leading scholars in the field. As part of the award, I will deliver her Bernath Lecture at the SHAFR luncheon held at the American Historical Association annual conference in New York City in January 2020, and my lecture will be published in Diplomatic History.
In have presented papers at numerous scholarly venues, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Association for Iranian Studies, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Nichols College, the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, the British Academy in London, the New England Historical Association, and the Temple University International History Workshop. My expertise has been called upon by the media, and I have given many public lectures.
Prior to joining the faculty at FAU in 2014, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia (2010-2011) and an Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage (2011-2014). I earned my Ph.D. in History at Temple University, M.A. in History at the University of Connecticut, and B.A. in History from Vassar College.
I am currently working on a book-length study of U.S. relations with Iran during the first half of the twentieth century, tentatively entitled "The Ties of Good Harmony": U.S.-Iran Relations, 1905-1953.