I learned about transnationalism long before I had a word for it. I grew up in Cairo, but my parents’ years working in Saudi Arabia meant that home, for my family, was always spread across more than one place. That early lesson has shaped my work ever since. As a sociologist, I study how globalization and migration reshape people’s lives: where they feel they belong, how they get ahead, and how they make sense of who they are.

My path has been as mobile as the people I study. After studying economics and Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, I moved to upstate New York and earned my PhD in Sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. Research and work then took me to Paris, Montreal, Dallas and Dubai, before I landed in Lund in the south of Sweden and decided to make it home.

My research follows a few connected questions:

• How do immigrants build lives across borders? My book The Lebanese Diaspora follows Lebanese immigrants in New York, Montreal and Paris. With Ramy Aly, I also edited The Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas.
• What do the children of immigrants make of their chances? With colleagues in the US and Europe, I compare how young people move from school to work and how they define success.
• How are refugees seen and treated? I study how newspapers in Sweden, Jordan and Turkey portray refugees, and the “bureaucratic violence” refugees meet in Northern European welfare states.
• How is women’s public life changing in the Arab world? I look at women’s leadership and activism in Egypt and the Gulf.

Today I am an Associate Professor in Sociology at Lund University. I previously spent nearly a decade at Lund’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and directed it in 2017–2018. My current projects look at migrant women from Ukraine and Syria in the Swedish labour market, and at what it takes for the children of immigrants to succeed.