• Since March 2019
  Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Mediterranean Studies
  Faculty of History, Ruhr-University Bochum
• 2017 to 2018
  Research Assistant at the eScience-Centre, University of Tübingen
• 2014
  PhD thesis on Political Relationships between Bedouins and Mamluks in 14th-Century Egypt
• 2008-2012
  Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at the SFB 586, Integration und Difference, University of Halle
• 2008
  Master Degree in Islamic Studies and History. Master Thesis on Freemasonry in late-Ottoman Beirut

The research project deals with families and households in late Ottoman Palestine, with a special focus on Gaza and the surrounding villages. Thanks to the Ottoman census gathered in 1905, we can gain new insights into the quite differentiated social worlds of households, which could consist of one to more than fifty persons, as well as into their wider family relations. The 1905 census was the most comprehensive ever undertaken in the Ottoman Empire and included, unlike previous population counts, individual data for women and children and not only for adult males.
The census records include information on various aspects of social life, such as occupation, health and residential patterns. By combining census data with evidence from other sources (e.g. travelogues, memoirs and contemporary photographs), we can discern different patterns of households from all social milieus. We are able to reconstruct strategies of elite households for achieving and maintaining status and influence, but our sources also provide information about subaltern groups that have been widely neglected in the historiography of Palestine and the Middle East.