About Me

Welcome! Let me introduce myself to you. I am Assistant Professor of Socio/cultural Anthropology in the Department of General Studies at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). I have done research in the Balkans, (Greece and Albania), Southeast Asia (Laos and the Philippines), and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The general focus of my research has focused on movement of peoples resulting from political and economic upheavals and how such movements affect local, ethnic and national identities. I examine how identities maintained, manipulated and expressed in these historical and changing social contexts.

I was born and raised in the United States but lived in Greece for twenty years. There, I taught anthropology at the American College of Greece. At the American College, I taught courses in general anthropology, cultural anthropology, ethnicity and identity,
physical anthropology, religions of the Mediterranean, anthropology of Greece, and visual anthropology. I also taught visual anthropology in Singapore as a visiting fellow at Nanyang Technical University. I received a PhD. in social anthropology from Durham University in the United Kingdom. The topic of my PhD. Thesis explores how Muslim Albanian immigrants and Christian Arvanites (Albanian speaking Greeks) relate and how transnationalism created a medium for a new relationship affecting their ethnic and national identities.

My focus in Saudi Arabia continues to be on transnationals. I just completed a project investigating how Filipino transnationals navigate their lives in Saudi Arabia.