I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. My research focuses on war, security, colonialism, decolonization, counterinsurgency, and racial capitalism in East Africa. My first book, The Long War on Terror: From Colonialism to Counterinsurgency in Kenya, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press (2027). The book is an ethnographic and historical study of the long durée process of decolonization and “recolonization” in Kenya, examined through the prism of counterinsurgency warfare. I have also written academic and public scholarship on piracy in the Indian Ocean, the securitization of refugee governance in East Africa, abolitionist politics, student activism in North America, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. I was previously an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, and have also taught at the City University of New York.

I have been an Fulbright Fellow and an ACLS Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. I am also an Editor of the journal, Focaal: A Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. More broadly my research and writing have been generously supported through grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation award, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, NSF, and CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics. I hold a PhD and MPhil in Anthropology from the City University of New York Graduate Center, a MA in Sociology from Central European University, and a BA in Philosophy from Bard College. 

My first book, The Long War on Terror: From Colonialism to Counterinsurgency in Kenya (SUP 2027), examines the colonial origins of counterterrorism, the shifting terrain of activism in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and the transformation of postcolonial politics, the state and cities under the auspice of the so-called Global War on Terror. As a historical ethnography of social transformation, the project traces the ways in which social relations, urban spaces, frontier zones, state institutions and struggles for social justice have been re-shaped by the war on terror in Kenya over the past two decades.

My writings have appeared in American Anthropologist ,  Anthropological Theory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Focaal, Anthropology Now, Cultural Anthropology (online), The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Waging Nonviolence, Africa is a Country, The Conversation, The Elephant, The Star (Kenya), Alternet, USA Today and N+1 as well as in several edited volumes. I was also a past editor and contributor to the Findings section in Anthropology Now from 2013-2016. My citations can be viewed on Google Scholar here.

In a past life, I also briefly studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music and have toured in the US and Europe.