I am a historian of technology with expertise in visual instruments, military ways of seeing, empire, and histories of disaster.

In 2021, I joined the University of Toronto as Assistant Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Previously, I received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2018 and then worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center and a lecturer in the Department of History at the same institution.

My writings have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Anthropology Today; Transbordeur; the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and the American Historical Review. Zakar is currently working on a manuscript tracing the history of vision and modern mapping in the late Ottoman Empire and in interwar Lebanon and Syria.

Outside my individual research, I enjoy collaborating with creative professionals and engineers towards generating cutting-edge research instruments that engage with the past as much as contemporary questions and concerns such as current technologies of war, visual technologies, and forgotten histories of chemistry.