He received his Ph.D. in History from Duke University, North Carolina in 2012 and holds an M.A. in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter. His research, in the fields of legal history and the history of capitalism, has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was also previously a Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. His next project is a microhistory of the dhow trade between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and will take on issues of international law, empire, mobility, writing, and scale -- all in a shifting seascape.