About
A sociolinguist of language as lived experience
How this line of thinking developed, and why these questions still feel unfinished.
Achievements at a glance
- EducationPhD, Applied Linguistics — Birkbeck, University of London
- Current postHonorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck (Oct 2026 – Sep 2029)
- Publications2 peer-reviewed journal articles · 7 under review · 1 book chapter in preparation
- Presentations5 international conference presentations (IGALA, BAAL) · invited Birkbeck seminars
- Teaching14 years, university-level, UK & Gulf higher education
- LeadershipLed concept, theme & planning, 2026 Health in Our Hands conference; opened the day
Intellectual biography
I did not begin as a researcher of infertility. I began as a teacher of writing — fourteen years of it, working with students for whom English was a second, third, or fourth language, and watching how much of what they struggled to say was not a grammar problem at all. It was a meaning problem: how do you put words to an experience your culture has no ready script for? That question followed me into doctoral study, and then refused to leave.
The doctoral project that grew from it — a close study of ten blogs, 411 posts, written by Muslim women across the UK, the US, the Gulf, South Africa, and Malaysia navigating infertility — was never really about infertility alone. It became a study of how people build a self in language when the life they expected does not arrive on schedule.
Research philosophy
I believe that behind every research question is a human experience, and behind every statistic is a story. Most of what shapes a life happens in language too small, informal, or easily dismissed to count as evidence in the conventional sense — and I think that smallness is exactly where the meaning lives. My method is accordingly close and patient: staying with the half-finished sentence, the joke that deflects pain, the pronoun that includes or excludes a reader, the metaphor reached for without thinking.
Career timeline
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2004 — 2018
Teaching and Research Assistant
University of Bahrain — undergraduate English language, academic writing, and ESP; helped establish the University's Writing Centre.
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2009
PCAP, York St John University
Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, completed while in post; secured FHEA.
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2018 — 2021
PhD, Applied Linguistics
Birkbeck, University of London. Supervised by Professor Lisa McEntee-Atalianis.
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2021 — 2023
Career break
Maternity leave.
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2026 — 2029
Honorary Research Fellow
Birkbeck, University of London, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Education
PhD, Applied Linguistics — Birkbeck, University of London (2018–2021) · MA, TESOL — Murray State University, USA · PCAP — York St John University (2009) · FHEA, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Memberships & affiliations
BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) · IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) · Society of Educational Consultants · Society of Authors
Influences
Read alongside, not imitated — Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg's small-stories approach, which gave this entire body of work its methodological backbone; Sayyid Kamal Al-Haidari's historical criticism and refusal of inherited authority; Elif Shafak's attention to overlooked lives; Khaled Hosseini's insistence that history is only legible through individual people. More in the Library →
A personal note
I am bilingual in Arabic and English, and that double vantage point shapes how I read — I notice what a phrase does in one language that it cannot quite do in the other. I am based in London, though the questions I work on followed me here from Bahrain, and from fourteen years of watching students search for words that did not yet exist for them.