I am Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I hold a doctorate in Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin.
I work on theoretical and applied linguistics, and have taught Arabic at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. At UNC Wilmington, I coordinate the Arabic program and Middle East & Islamic Studies minor.
I am particularly interested in historical processes that lead to dialect diversification. My doctoral dissertation looked at the concept of definiteness and how it is expressed in different Arabic varieties. I have more recently worked on the historical dialectology of Moroccan Arabic and Middle Arabic texts composed in North Africa.