Nora is a Kuwait University Fellow and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow pursuing anthropological archaeology of West Asia in the Anthropology program. While her anthropological interests are vast, her main focus in this program are cultural heritage, ethics in archaeological practice, national trauma, museum studies, historic knowledge production, identity politics, and ethnographic fieldwork of the Arabian Peninsula. The main initiatives of her work at Penn is to decolonize and reframe anthropological practices to better fit the current, lived communities that are directly affected by the discipline's research. Representation plays a critical role in her micro and macro level initiatives and drives her passion to shed light on neglected narratives in anthropology.
Nora graduated with a BA in Anthropology from the American University of Kuwait (2021) and an MA from North Carolina State University (2023). For her PhD dissertation, she is interested in the intersections of social memory and historic knowledge produced by personal experiences and sentiments tied to a national trauma. She is interested in establishing a multivocal research project that considers how memory is impacted by the past, present, and future while merging interdisciplinary methods of living memory with “dead” history.