I am a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East, Iran, and the neighboring regions where Persian was the literary language.
Currently I am working on my first book monograph, entitled “Secularisation, Mass Literacy and Education in Modern Iran.” The monograph explains the relationship between the state, education, and religious orientations in modern Iran. Covering new source material and complicating extant scholarship, I argue that education reforms, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not secular in character; however, new educational institutions inadvertently resulted in the secularization of knowledge and literate culture. In modern Iran, the publicness of political Islam and the secularization of culture occurred in tandem, generating divisions over the role of religion in society into the present day.
Alongside these themes, my journal publications make sense of the impact of industrialism and cultural imperialism on Iran and the Middle East. More broadly, I research and teach on historiography and historical method, intellectual history, imperialism, and postcolonial theory.
I have contributed to public history projects at Stanford University, Columbia University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Working with teams of scholars and archivists, we aimed to increase public access to Persian manuscripts and documents. Before coming to LUMS, I taught at the University of Tehran and Columbia University where I also received my Ph.D. (2022) in Middle Eastern Studies.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
- “Secularisation, Mass Literacy and Education in Modern Iran,” Edinburgh University Press (monograph under contract).
- “The Persian Carpet in Crisis: The Emergence of Modern Dyeing Education in Qajar Iran (1882-1922).” The Journal of Modern Craft, Taylor & Francis (with Sajjad Norouzi and Hassan Zandieh), 17:3, 207-220 (December 2024)
- “From The Creators of Knowledge to the Specialists of Spirit: Anti-Clericalism in Iran’s Modernist Intellectual Discourse (1925-1941),” Harvard Theological Review, Cambridge University Press, 117:4, 820-36 (October 2024)
- "Reflections on Cultural Imperialism: Iran’s Discourse of Misery (badbaxti)". Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies, The University of Tehran Press, 7:4, 713-740 (July 2023)
- “The Origins of Dabestān: Mīrzā Ḥasan Rushdīyeh and the Quest for New Education,” Iranian Studies, Cambridge University Press, 53:1, 1-33 (May 2020).
SELECT PUBLIC HISTORY PROJECTS
- Science, Nature and Beauty: Harmony and Cosmological Perspectives in Islamic Science, Koukab Chebaro, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022) (curatorial team member).