I received my PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2018. Overall, my research asks how unique sites of colonial contact shaped ideologies of gender and empire. My dissertation, “A Mandate to Protect: Imperial Encounters and Affective Ideologies Between France and Lebanon, 1860-1931,” examined the formation of an imperial relationship between France and Lebanon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, investigating how a range of encounters between writers and travelers, industrialists and workers, activists and administrators, and everyday French and Lebanese men and women informed the transition from informal protectorate to formal colonial regime.