I am an Arabist and nerd for all things Arabic. I am interested in Tunisian Arabic, Arabic linguistics, and literary translation. For fun I contribute to Wikipedia and code things (like this website) in Python.
Dissertation Focus: Syntax of Tunisian Arabic
Thesis Topic: “Fī (‘in’) as a marker of the progressive aspect in Tunisian Arabic: A cognitive and historic approach.”
Redesigning Arabic curriculum for web-based language and cultural training for military foreign area officers. Project involves researching and collecting level-appropriate authentic materials, creating exercises (listening, reading, practical and supplemental), and creating assessments.
Inaugurated office and built program to support military-affiliated students on campus. Also served as a first-year and sophomore academic advisor, a member of the Diversity Advisory Board, a member of the Health Careers Advisory Committee, and a First Readings seminar leader.
Reviewed entries for the Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014) including verifying the accuracy and naturalness of English translations of Arabic headwords and examples, as well as utilizing the billion-word Oxford Arabic corpus to expand entries and discover new word senses that were previously not reflected in existing monolingual or bilingual Arabic dictionaries. Also prepared resource materials for the team and trained other reviewers.
Responsible for reviewing and translating entries for the CJK Arabic Learners’ Dictionary. Ensured accuracy of English translations and appropriateness of Arabic examples. Also ensured that sense division, headword selection, organization of entries, and typography follow set guidelines.
Tunisian Arabic Corpus: Created the first large-scale corpus of Tunisian Arabic, available free to the public at tunisiya.org. Corpus contains materials from a wide variety of genres, including folktales, talk radio, blogs, and screenplays, and is accessible through a custom-built search and concordancing tool. This corpus has been of value to scholars all over the world, including in a recent book: Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators by David Wilmsen of the American University of Beirut. The ultimate goal of the corpus is to provide data for reference materials for Tunisian Arabic (and North African Arabic more broadly), most critically a bilingual Tunisian-English dictionary and basic coursebook for Tunisian Arabic. http://www.tunisiya.org
I'm currently working on the translation of Lebanese writer Inaya Jaber's book Nobody Gets Lost in Beirut.