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, as well as core faculty in Religious Studies 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, Arabic, and Urdu, but I'm also comfortable in Hebrew and Spanish, have reading knowledge of French and Italian, and am working on German and Turkish (among other languages).
My full CV is available upon request.