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. He is currently finishing his first book on the topic of Romani kinship in Palestine. Expected to be published in 2023 by University of Toronto Press, 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—and is expected to be published in 2023 by the American University of Cairo Press. For the for the 2022-2023 academic year he is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at the American Center of Research in Jordan, where he is embarking on new research on Muslim missionary work (da'wah) among Romanies and other minority groups in Jordan.