I am an Assistant Professor of the Humanities, specializing in the literary and intellectual cultures of South Asia and the Near East. I work primarily with classical Persian, and also with Urdu and Arabic; newer projects include Russian and English as well. My research focuses on forms of thought, methods of inquiry, and varieties of experience that are made possible by imaginative literature. Recent publications discuss planetary poetics; the Arabic concept of taste (dhawq) and seventeenth-century English thought; a geopolitical turn in Persian literary criticism; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for Persian poets. My current book project investigates how poetry shaped new kinds of inquiry across disciplines in the early modern Persianate world. Other ongoing projects, both individual and co-authored, aim to bridge the studies of South Asian, Near Eastern, and European cultures through comparison and collaboration. My CV and publications can be found here.
Selected Publications
2024 “Fayzi’s Planetary Poetics: A Theory of Poetry.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (in press).
2023 “Expansive Comparison: Thinking across Persian and English Terms and Temporalities.” In TheArt of Teaching Persian Literature: From Theory to Practice, eds. Franklin D. Lewis, A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, and Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi. Leiden: Brill (in press).
2023 “Taste/Dhawq”. In Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, eds. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; in press).
2023 “‘Worlds Together Shined’: Bidel, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison.” Co-authored with Timothy M. Harrison. PMLA 138.5 (Oct. 2023), 1127-1148.
2023 “The Grounds of Verse: A Geopolitical Turn in Early Modern Persian Literary
Criticism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Literature, ed. Kamran Talattof, (New York: Routledge, 2023).
2022 “Color’s Fracture: Translating Fugitive Experience in Early Modern Persian Poetry.” In TheRoutledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, eds. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Michelle Quay, & Patricia J. Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2022).
2021 “What Was Early Modern World Literature?” Modern Philology 119.1 (August 2021). Co-authored with Timothy M. Harrison. Special issue, “Multiplicities: Recasting the Early Modern Global” (eds. Carina Johnson and Ayesha Ramachandran).
2019 “Flights of Imagination: Avicenna’s Phoenix (‘Anqa) and Bidel’s Figuration for the Lyric Self.” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 2 (2019), 28-72.
2019 “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.
2019 “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.
2017 “Of Parrots and Crows: Bidel and Hazin in their Own Words.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 37.3 (2017), 510-530. Special issue, “Circulation and Language: Iranians in Early Modern India,” eds. Usman Hamid and Pasha M. Khan.
Courses
I teach courses on thought experiments, bilingualism, neurodiversity, and South Asian literatures; I also offer advanced seminars on classical Persian epic, lyric, and prose.
HUMS 034 Six Pretty Good Thought Experiments
HUMS 031/LITR 030 Bilingual Imaginaries: Thinking, Living, and Writing across Languages
LITR 454 Neurodiversity and World Literature
LITR 278/SAST 273 Reimaginings: South Asian Literatures Past and Present
NELC 444/844 Classical Persian Lyric
NELC 443/843 Classical Persian Epic
NELC 442/842 Classical Persian Prose
NELC 441/841 Introduction to Classical Persian
Education
PhD University of Chicago, 2019
South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
(joint degree)