His research focuses on empire and colonialism, state formation and nonstate forms of political organization, and ethnicity and nationalism in North Africa and the Middle East. His book Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity was published by Cornell University Press in 2015. His current book project, Reimagining the Middle East: Jihads, Empires, and the Long Great War, focuses on an interconnected set of jihads/revolts from Morocco to Iraq between 1911 and 1931 to demonstrate that, rather than being imposed unilaterally by the European imperial powers, the region’s modern political map was negotiated on the ground through violent clashes between local and colonial visions for the postwar order.