I owe my path to academia largely to my family. My childhood home was in many ways like an Ottoman Sufi lodge, facilitating the travels of performers, students, businessmen, and most often, refugees. I understood that even more important than shifting geographic boundaries are the cultural overlaps created by people in their assertion of agency and victimhood; their participation in both ethnic plurality and exclusion.

I plan to explore these assertions with a geographic focus on the Caucasus. I seek to examine not only how Russian-Ottoman migration facilitated change and modernization, but how newly formed identities have resulted from the cultural diffusion of these engagements. I was born in North Ossetia, Russia, and am fluent in Russian and English. My research languages also include Turkish, Arabic, and Ottoman. 

I studied Arabic in Amman, Jordan through the Critical Language Scholarship in 2017 and received my B.A. from the George Washington University in 2019. Before joining Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, I worked as the Associate Editor of The Middle East Journal at the Middle East Institute.