I’m a cultural and urban geographer based at Syracuse University.

Drawing on a background in geography, area studies, and literature, my research cuts across three overlapping themes:

(1) Meanings, or how differently positioned individuals and institutions make and transform places and landscapes to define and contest shared meanings;

(2) pasts, or how those geographies of meaning mobilize relations across time; and

(3) publics, or how group membership is defined through both common and contested forms of place-making.

Drawing on a suite of qualitative methods, I study how urban inhabitants develop a sense of who they are in relation to where they are. My long-term fieldwork relationship with Turkey (and the post-Ottoman world more generally) and my interdisciplinary collaborations echo and extend the geographer Tariq Jazeel’s (2017: 336) recent call “to ‘abide by’ the places on which we work,” but I am also interested in building new collaborations that span cities around the world.