I am a literary historian interested in the literature, history, and philology of the Middle East and South Asia.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature. Prior to joining UMN, I was the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature at the University of Oklahoma. I have also taught at Université Paris Nanterre.

In addition to teaching, I previously worked to catalog Urdu and Persian materials for the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library and the UCLA library's Special Collections.

I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine (2017), where I also received my MA (2012), and completed a BA with Honors in Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2008).

My research stems from my lifelong obsession with language. I am especially interested in the question of language in the Persianate world, the region spanning much of Eurasia where Persian was once a lingua franca. My first book on this topic, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India, was published with Cambridge University Press.

I work primarily in Persian and Urdu, but I'm also comfortable in Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, and have reading knowledge of French and Italian.

My full CV is available upon request.