I am currently a research fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic. Previously, I was a Kluge Fellow at the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC; Distinguished Visiting Professor (Class of 1955 Chair in Middle East Studies) at the United States Naval Academy; and Visiting Scholar and Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Postdoctoral Fellow for Transregional Research at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. My research focuses on the diverse geographies and societies of the early modern and modern Persianate world in Iran, Central, and South Asia, with an emphasis on the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. I seek to highlight the many inter-connections, and later divergences, between these regions through the prism of Persian literary production, circulation of texts, political culture, social life, and intellectual interchange. My research, therefore, brings into contact socio-political and literary trends of the early modern and modern Persianate world from the heyday of the Mughal and Safavid Empires and imperial decline to the rise of colonialism, emergence of nationalism, and the advent of print. My writings on US foreign policy, the Middle East, and Muslim World have appeared in such publications as Al Jazeera, Words without Borders, Muftah, The Hill, War on the Rocks and Jadaliyya.

Literature

Persian

19th-21st Centuries

Afghanistan

India

Iran

Tajikistan

Arabic (advanced)

Persian (fluent)

Russian (intermediate)