Atoor is a graduate student at the Center for Middle East  Studies at the University of Chicago. She assists in the NSF- funded project, Dyadic Rapport Within and Across Cultures:  Multimodal Assessment in Human-Human and Human-Computer  Interaction. She spent Winter, 2009 doing field work in  Amman, Jordan and Al-Ain, the United Arab Emirates. Her  interests include semiotics, ethnography, and Arabic and  Persian literature and poetry.