I am an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research interests revolve around premodern Persian literature and its adjacent traditions and interlocutors, particularly in Arabic, Greek, Georgian, and western European languages. The core of my scholarship has focused on the emergence of romance in Persian literature as a prestigious literary genre, crafted to produce new kinds of insight into the world through the faculty of imagination and experiential engagement. My major work in this regard is a monograph entitled Love at a Crux: The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages (U. of Toronto Press, 2023), available Open Access here. I am also developing a second project around monstrosity and otherness in narratives about love, (anti-)heroism, and travel.