Arpan is a recent PhD in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins. He researches various topics based around themes of religion, ethics, language, and the experience of difference in the Arab world. His first book is on the topic of Romani kinship in Palestine. The book focuses on how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together to articulate a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference makes a case for such “other” alterity for Romani people in Palestine, and argues against the viability of rigid identitarian categories that are wholesale adopted from European and American experiences of minoritization.

A second book project is a co-edited multidisciplinary volume on plurality in Palestine that is the first book project of Insaniyyat—the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists—published by the American University of Cairo Press. He was a 2022-2023 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at the American Center of Research in Jordan, where he embarked on new research on Muslim missionary work (da'wah) among Romanies and other minority groups in Jordan.