Education

University of Chicago - PhD, 2019

Research Interests

My research and teaching focus on literary cultures of South Asia and the Near East, with a particular interest in comparative literature, philosophy and literature, theories of literature, translation studies, and entangled early modernities. I am committed to projects, both individual and collaborative, that bridge the studies of South Asian, Near Eastern, and European literary and intellectual cultures. In recent publications, I discuss representations of what I call fugitive experience in early modern Persian poetry; a geopolitical turn in seventeenth-century literary criticism; concepts of innovation, canonicity, and exile in Safavid and Mughal literary traditions; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for early modern Persian poets. My essays and translations have appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Journal of South Asian Intellectual History; Asymptote; and edited volumes. A full research statement, publications, and CV can be found on my website.

I co-convene the Early Modern Workshop with Ricardo Padrón and Joshua White.

Teaching 

• Imagine This: A Course on Thought Experiments (EGMT 1510)
• Devotional Poetry: Religion and Literature (RELI 3120)
• Lost and Found in Translation (EGMT 1530)
• Sufism: Islamic Mysticism (RELI 3120)
• Rumi: From Konya to California (MESA 3559)
• Classical Persian Literature in Translation (PETR 3559)

Selected Publications 

• "Taste as Method: The Arabic Concept of Direct Experience (Dhawq) and Seventeenth-Century English Thought.” In Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World,  eds. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; submitted).
• "'Worlds Together Shined’: Bidel, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison.” Co-authored with Timothy M. Harrison. PMLA (accepted).
• "The Grounds of Verse; A Geopolitical Turn in Early Modern Persian Literary Criticism” In The Routledge Handbook on Persian Literature (ed. Kamran Talattof); forthcoming.
• "Color's Fracture: Translating Fugitive Experience in Early Modern Persian Poetry.” In The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (eds. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Michelle Quay, and Patricia J. Higgins); forthcoming.
• "What Was Early Modern World Literature?” Co-authored with Timothy M. Harrison. Modern Philology 119.1 (August 2021). Special issue, “Multiplicities: Recasting the Early Modern Global,” edited by Carina Johnson and Ayesha Ramachandran.
• “Flights of Imagination: Avicenna’s Phoenix (ʿAnqā) and Bīdel’s Figuration for the Lyric Self.” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History (2019), 20-72. Special issue on selfhood in the poetry and philosophy of Bīdel Dehlavī (eds. Sajjad Rizvi and Prashant Keshavmurthy).
• “The Mind Is Its Own Place: Of Lalla’s Comparative Poetics” (co-authored with Sonam Kachru). University of Toronto Quarterly 88.2 (2019), 125-141. Special issue on comparative poetics and world poetics (eds. Ming Xie, Jonathan Hart).
• “The Way of Tradition and the Path of Innovation: Aurangzeb and Dara Shukuh Contend for the Mughal Throne.” In Empires of the Near East and India: Sources for the Study of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Societies. Ed. Hani Khafipour, 240-260. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
• “Of Parrots and Crows: Bīdel and Ḥazīn in their Own Words.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 37.3 (2017), 510-530.