About me

I am an environmental historian of the modern Middle East. My work centers on water: how water shapes politics and societies, how people harness and use water, and how knowledge about water influences culture. I am particularly interested in how nature, culture, and technology meet, and how historians might profit from different ways of analyzing causal relationships in the past.

My new book, Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, will be published by Stanford University Press in January 2026. Two Rivers Entangled asserts the importance of ecological change in the twentieth-century political and social history of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The book shows how the natural world interacted with human endeavors to establish new states, to move and manage water, and to build dams.

Preorder Two Rivers Entangled from Amazon or Bookshop.

As an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver, I teach courses on Middle East and Islamic history, environmental and energy history, and methods courses on global history and historiography. In the International Studies program, I teach a foundational course for undergraduates.