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.