I am a queer feminist anthropologist and an uninvited immigrant living and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) People. I recently joined the UBC Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor.

I completed my Ph.D. (2021) in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University with a concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Before coming to the field of anthropology, I received an M.A. (2014) in Near Eastern Studies at New York University and a B.A. (2011) in Political Sciences at Bogazici University in Turkey, where I was born and raised. In 2021-22, I was the the Martha LA McCain postdoctoral fellow in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

My research and teaching include transnational sexualities, migration, asylum, waiting, humanitarianism, and queer (im)mobilities with a specific focus on the Middle East and its diasporas as well as collaborative, multimodal, and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production.

Currently, I am working on my first book manuscript, which offers an engaged ethnography of queer and trans asylum from the Middle East to North America by centering the experiences of Iranian LGBTQ refugees awaiting in Turkey for resettlement to the US and Canada.

I am also excited to be developing two new research projects, one focusing on private refugee sponsorship in Canada and one exploring the connections between migration, sexuality, and art (particularly drag).

Since 2015, I have also worked as a co-editor of the Turkey Page at Jadaliyya e-zine and authored contributions on sexuality, law, and violence in Turkey and beyond.