Lena Nasrallah joined the PhD program in 2019. Her research centers around planned cities in the modern Middle East with strong transregional interests in South Asia as well. She focuses primarily on the control of infrastructure, morality and citizenship, and nation formation as realized through urban space.

Lena received her B.A. in History from Yale University in 2018. Her senior thesis explored the reception and archiving of land squatting in rulings by the Calcutta High Court in post-Partition West Bengal.