My research interests center on questions about how people think of themselves as belonging to multiple groups-- often overlapping and occasionally opposing. Whether ethnic, religious, national, political, economic, or other, these ways of thinking about ourselves and what we are part of shapes and is shaped by the societies in which we live. As a historian, I am particularly interested in investigating the ways that these notions of self and community can change over time and what these changes say about the broader society. In particular, I am drawn to the study of minority communities such as Muslim Americans and Iraqi Jews. Each of these communities' experiences have much to tell about the evolution of their society's political culture that can't be found through any other perspective. They share in common the experience of having elements of their identity such as Muslim and American or Jewish and Iraqi declared to be contradictory by others despite their insistence to the contrary. Thus, these case studies offer important insights into the predicaments of the politics of those in and whose out--a predicament faced by more and more people in our world today.